#22 - Global Reference, Must Be True

[Administrator]

Please post your questions below! Thank you!

[appletree]

Hello,
I picked answer C because all of the other answer choices were very unsupported. However, I am finding a hard time finding good justification for answer C.
The only evidence I could find was at the end of the second paragraph with the sentence "experience shows that harmful pollutants... rarely attempted to remedy this situation."
I can see this supports the idea that nations are not really held accountable because they keep doing the same bad stuff over and over, but saying they are rarely LEGALLY held accountable based on this seems a bit too strong?
Could someone please clarify? Is there some additional evidence I am missing?
Thank you!

[Ryan Twomey]

Hey Appletree,

So this is a great question. And you may already know this, but I always like to reiterate this in the more difficult must be true (most strongly supported) questions in reading comp: they are asking which answer choice is the most strongly supported out of the five, not which answer is definitively true.

But I do think the sentence you point outsupports answer choice C. I will post it here for the other students who view this in the future: "Although systematic empirical studies are lacking, experience shows that harmful pollutants constantly cross most international borders, and that nations have only rarely attempted to remedy this situation."

This was considered a principle by the author in previous sentences, and it has been "rarely" even been attempted to be remedied. The first sentence in paragraph 3 also supports this answer choice.

I don't think this answer choice is by any means 100% certainly true, but based on the passage, I'd give it an 80-90% chance of being true, which is higher than the remaining 4 answer choices, making this answer choice the most strongly supported.

I hope this helps, and I wish you all of the luck in your studies.

Best,
Ryan

[domthedestroyer]

Why is D wrong? I figured that the main reason a country would be seen as "violating" an international environmental law is because they don't adopt that law as one of their own. And they're able to get away with it because these laws are unenforceable since there's no agreement. The last 3 sentences of Paragraph 3 kind of support this. The author basically says that countries can engage in "environmental law wars" where they criticize other nations by saying "Hey, look! This country is bad for not following this specific environmental law!" Meanwhile, that other country doesn't even recognize that law as law. The last sentence of that paragraph says "[these norms] merely represent some collective ideals." I took this to mean that there's a general group of norms found across countries, but each country might only recognize a few of them with some overlap. As a result, countries may engage in activities that seem to "violate" laws from other nations' standpoints, but are actually completely legal to the violating country.

And as for the word "most" in the answer choice, I figured that the main reason the violations would be happening would be for the reasons stated above. Why would a country have a law just to violate it? Sure, it may happen as stated in Paragraph 2, but I figured most nations who were violating certain norms would just not have that norm as one of their officially stated norms.

As for C, I don't see how you can infer that nations aren't held legally accountable just because they don't remedy the situation. In real life, the International Criminal Court can hold individuals legally accountable for committing war crimes, but don't have the power to bring about a remedy (trying the individual in a tribunal) if say, the host nation in which the individual resides refuses to give him up. So you could theoretically see instances of a lack of a remedy where there IS legal accountability. I believe inferring otherwise, as you would have to with choice C, is rather erroneous. Thoughts?

[Jeff Wren]

Hi Dom,

Answer D states that most of the violations come from "disagreements about what constitutes customary law." Customary international law is defined in the passage as "that body of commonly accepted-but not formalized-legal principles..." (lines 5-6). In other words, the "customary international law" are not actual laws at all but merely commonly agreed upon customs/standards.

What Answer D is describing, therefore, would be if different countries actually disagreed on what these standards should be. For example, if Country A declared that it thinks that it is perfectly acceptable for its pollution to spill over into other countries and other countries disagreed.

This is not what happens in the passage. The two environmental principles discussed in the first paragraph are "often held to be established norms" (lines 8-9). In other words, countries generally agree on what should be the environmental norms that countries should follow. The fact that many nations don't actually follow these norms in practice does not imply that they disagree with the norms in theory.

You note that the passage states "[these norms] merely represent some collective ideals" (lines 43-45). While this is definitely the author's view, this does not mean that the countries disagree on what the ideals are or should be. Rather, they simply don't actually live up to their ideals for any number of reasons.

To use an analogy, even people who commit murder generally don't believe/argue that murder should be perfectly acceptable and legal in all situations.

As for Answer C, to be held legally accountable means not only to be found legally responsible for certain actions but also to the receive the legal consequences for those actions, whether those be sanctions, imprisonment, etc.. "Remedies" in the passage refers to legal remedies, which can come in several forms, including simple punitive damages/fines or specific performance, such as cleaning up the environmental pollution. In other words, if a country does not actually suffer any actual consequences for its actions, then it would not be accurate to say that the country was held legally accountable.