#11 - Unless the residents of Glen Hills band together, the

[James Finch]

Hi Kalifa,

Taking a contrapositive of a conditional chain is the same as taking a single conditional's contrapositive: you flip and negate the entire chain. So if we have a chain of:

GHBT PRZA ABW&SS BNR STI

then our contrapositive chain would look like:

STI BNR ABW&SS PRZA GHBT

Using the chains, we could also make inferences such as:

GHBT STI

and

STI GHBT

Hope this clears things up!

[christinecwt]

Hi All - just wonder why can't choose the answer D instead of answer B....Many thanks!

[Adam Tyson]

Answer D is a Mistaken Negation, christinecwt - we know that building new apartments would be sufficient to make higher taxes necessary, but we can never say that the absence of a sufficient condition (no new apartments) would prove the absence of the necessary condition (no higher taxes). Taxes might still go up for any number of other reasons! The necessary condition in a conditional relationship can occur even when the sufficient condition does not. For example:

If I eat this whole giant box of cookies, I will make myself sick.

I didn't eat the whole box.

Does this prove I didn't make myself sick? Nope. There's still a lot of chips and ice cream in the house that I could gorge on!

[christinecwt]

Thanks Adam! This helps a lot!

[ericsilvagomez]

Hi,

I chose answer choice A, and I think I got it wrong for two reasons: the "will" in the answer choice is too strong, and the first sentence says that unless they band together the proposal will be approved, not that developers would not build apartment houses. Without writing out the conditional relationships, I think B could be correct because it seems to connect with the different relationships throughout the stimulus. As for my conditional relationships, I put: "proposal to rezone the city will be approved" -> "the residents of Glen Hills band together" -> "that developers need in order to construct apartment houses here" -> "roads (crossed out) or additional schools (crossed out)"-> "substantial tax increases for the residents of Glen Hills" What do you think of this outline of the conditional relationships? Also, is the correct answer choice supposed to connect to some of them, like I mentioned when describing choosing B?

[srusty]

Hi,

I chose answer choice A, and I think I got it wrong for two reasons: the "will" in the answer choice is too strong, and the first sentence says that unless they band together the proposal will be approved, not that developers would not build apartment houses. Without writing out the conditional relationships, I think B could be correct because it seems to connect with the different relationships throughout the stimulus. As for my conditional relationships, I put: "proposal to rezone the city will be approved" -> "the residents of Glen Hills band together" -> "that developers need in order to construct apartment houses here" -> "roads (crossed out) or additional schools (crossed out)"-> "substantial tax increases for the residents of Glen Hills" What do you think of this outline of the conditional relationships? Also, is the correct answer choice supposed to connect to some of them, like I mentioned when describing choosing B?

Hi Eric,

You're right about answer choice (A), the "will" is too strong. With the conditional reasoning, the "unless" indicates a necessary condition, as such:
~Proposal Approved -----> Residents Banded Together

To get to the correct answer, for this question, it is not necessary to go through the conditional chains. The statements in the stimulus lay out for us that if new apartments are build, they will have increased population, needing new roads, and for the new roads/schools, we will need to tax Glen Hills residents. However, to organize the statements, it can be helpful to link the concepts together with conditional reasoning.

Hope this helps!

[askuwheteau@protonmail.com]

This problem challenged me. I diagramed the stimulus: Don't band together>proposal approved>apts built>new residents>overcrowding of schools and roads> new roads built>resid tax increases.

Here's my logic:

A: is a mistaken negation of a portion of the conditional chain
B: is a repeat of a portion of the conditional chain
C: is Out of Scope with the conditional chain (the chain doesn't discuss loss of rural atmosphere)
D: is a mistaken negation of a portion of the conditional chain
E: is a mistaken negation of a portion of the conditional chain

Am I correct in my understanding of why B is the correct answer and A, C, D, &, E are wrong answers.

Thanks,

Jonathan

[Chandler H]

Hi Jonathan,

This is a pretty challenging one! You're 90% of the way there in your understanding of why answer choice (B) is correct, but there is one key component you might be missing.

The stimulus tells us that, if the proposal is approved, "... the city will be able to build the water and sewer systems that developers need in order to construct apartment houses there. These buildings would attract new residents..."

If we read that closely, we see that the conditional expressed here is as follows:

CAH BW&SS

In other words, it is necessary to build the water and sewer systems in order to construct the apartment houses. It would be a mistaken reversal to say that BW&SS CAH. Just because the water and sewer systems are built doesn't mean that the apartment houses will 100% be built.

However, answer choice (B) is valid because, like you said, it restates the portion of the conditional chain AFTER the new apartments are built, which looks like this:

CAH ANR NRB STI

That is, if those apartment houses are constructed, then they'll attract new residents, and then new roads will be built, and then there will be substantial tax increases. Therefore, answer choice (B) is correct.

Hopefully this all makes sense!

[askuwheteau@protonmail.com]

Hi Chandler,

I went back and reread the stimulus and see that I missed the sufficient condition indicator (in order to). This certainly was a subtle, but important point which strengthened by understanding of this conditional reasoning-heavy type problem. Thank you for taking time to address my question.

Jonathan