Q7 - Opponent of offshore oil drilling

[KakaJaja]

Hi, I got this one correct, but I am not sure about C).

Is C) wrong because from proponent's perspective, opponent's argument is not legitimate at all?

Also has any one of you met a question in LSAT that tests about "misapplication of way of arguing"?

Thanks.

[griffin.811]

IMO this wording is VERY ambiguous. The best I can offer is make sure that if you are going to select an ambiguous answer choice that none of the other answers make better sense. In this case D clearly does.

Also we are told nothing about the frequency with which the type of arguing employed by the opponent is used. We can't just assume his method is used frequently because it is used frequently in reality (whether or not it really is).

[nmop_apisdn2]

IMO this wording is VERY ambiguous. The best I can offer is make sure that if you are going to select an ambiguous answer choice that none of the other answers make better sense. In this case D clearly does.

Also we are told nothing about the frequency with which the type of arguing employed by the opponent is used. We can't just assume his method is used frequently because it is used frequently in reality (whether or not it really is).

Yeah, D is the clear answer here because of the way the proponent argues. He makes it seem like the Opponent is "ridiculous" in his argumentation, by saying that if he argues X way then he would agree with Y, which is the wrong way to argue.

C is wrong because he implies that the sort of argumentation the opponent is using is wrong, and our answer here says that that type of argumentation is legit, when it's really not.

[tommywallach]

Hey Guys,

Great conversation already, but I'll take it top to bottom, so we have it done.

OOOD: Benefit of .5% more oil isn't worth risk of big spill.
POOD: That's dumber then saying no farms cuz each farm only provides a little bit more food.

(A) The proponent doesn't actually offer any evidence.

(B) The proponent doesn't say the facts are inaccurate, but that a different conclusion can be drawn from them.

(C) I think what a lot of you are missing is that language like thiswould certainly be allowed in the answer choice if it had been justified by the stimulus itself. I could easily make answer choice (C) correct:

Proponent of offshore oil drilling: While it is usually legitimate to cite a small potential gain versus a large potential downside, in this case, the numbers don't bear out your position. .5% more oil is actually worth hundreds of millions of dollars per year.

(D) Correct. "You might just as well argue" signals a parallel argument, and this farm one is really dumb ("strikingly unsupported") because new farms don't carry a potential downside.

(E) This answer choice would have the proponent using the opponent's statistics against him. But this is not what the proponent does (he uses a metaphor and more or less insults the opponent instead!).

Hope that helps!

-t