Q4 - The government has spent heavily to clean groundwater c

[ottoman]

This is a "determine the function" question.

The question asks what role does the proposal about how the government's budget should be redirected play.

First of all, we should identify the conclusion. The conclusion is more of the government's budget should be redirected to preventing spills. That's it! It is the conclusion!!! But stay tuned. Let us work though the whole question.

Now we need to find premises that support the conclusion.

premise1: government has spent heavily on cleaning groundwater. Not one has been completely cleaned. More and more are spilled.

premise2: prevention measure is more effective. makes no sense prevention measure is less than the clean-up site.

Can someone help me with answer choice D? English is not my first language, sometimes I struggle with abstract language.

Thank you!

[ohthatpatrick]

Great work with identifying the argument core!

"should" is a great indicator of opinion (and conclusions are always opinions).

The following sentence begins with "since", indicating premise support (and conclusions are always supported).

(A) This is incorrect because the "more $$ should go to prevention" is supported. (Pretty much everything else in the argument supports it). It's also incorrect to call this claim a 'speculation', which means 'a hypothesis or conjecture'. "should" indicates more of a 'suggestion or recommendation'. You can use the adjective 'normative' to describe claims that say what should / ought to be.

(B) This describes an Intermediate (Subsidiary) Conclusion. This type of claim has its own supporting premise, but it serves to support the Main Conclusion. (B) is incorrect here because we're being asked about the Main Conclusion, not an Intermediate one.

(D) 'presupposition' normally is a paraphrase for 'assumption'.
When you see Flaw answer choices say
- "presupposes, without providing justification, .." that means the same as "takes for granted" which means the same as "assumes".

However, this answer curiously says 'presupposition on which the argument is explicitly based'.

Assumptions are UN-stated. If we're talking about an explicit supposition, we're talking about something like this:

People think that science will solve all our problems. But suppose that an alien race came to earth and suddenly kidnapped all our best scientists. Clearly, that would be a problem that science couldn't solve.

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The second sentence would be a 'presupposition on which the argument is explicitly based'.

(E) There were no other proposals in the argument. This answer is meant to be tempting because the author compares prevention efforts/costs to clean-up efforts/costs. But no one in the argument proposes we spend more of the govt's money on clean-up.