Question Type:
Determine the Function
Stimulus Breakdown:
Conclusion: It is an unsustainable position to argue that "punishment should be proportional to the offense, but also repeat offenders should get harsher penalties".
Evidence: Previous offenses are remote considerations, and if you start roping in remote considerations then you'll make it near impossible to apply the proportionality principle, which only cares about THIS offense.
Answer Anticipation:
The stem is asking about the role of the 2nd sentence. We should always get a blunt prephrase that at least gets at whether a claim played the role of MAIN CONC, SUPPORT, OPPOSING, or NEUTRAL.
The 2nd sentence is definitely part of the support. If we wanted to get more nuanced, we can say "it's an implication of the position stated in the first sentence" whose further implications the author takes to be a logical absurdity.
Correct Answer:
D
Answer Choice Analysis:
(A) This sounds like an Intermediate Conclusion. Is our claim something the author provided grounds to accept? No.
(B) The first half is great, the second half is opposite.
(C) Not the overall conclusion, which is the 1st sentence.
(D) Yes. "It is a consequence of a view rejected in the argument's main conclusion" is easy to match.
The main conclusion says that "The position … is unsustainable".
The 2nd sentence says that "The position IMPLIES [our claim]."
So our claim is an implication/consequence of the view/position that's being rejected in the main conclusion.
Can we say that it's an allegedly untenable consequence?
Yes, because we're saying
"The original position implies [our claim]. If [our claim] is true, then something else would be true that would make the original position impossible to hold."
(E) No, we can't find an intermediate conclusion anywhere in this argument. When they provide and test intermediate conclusions, they provide either SUPPORT or CONCLUSION indicator words to help us clearly see the support/conclusion relationship between a premise and an intermediate conclusion.
Takeaway/Pattern: This is a pretty tough DTF question. People will probably struggle to find the conclusion, struggle to understand the self-defeating logic the author is exposing, and struggle to like the language in (D). If we can do at least some of that right and narrow it down to a better guess, job well done. This sort of argument structure is sometimes called something like "reductio ad absurdum" (no idea what the Latin is), but it means "it reduces to absurdity". You basically follow the logical implications of something until it blows up in its face, in order to show that the original position was bad.
#officialexplanation