Q25 - Mayor: Periodically an ice cream company will hold

[ohthatpatrick]

Question Type:
Role/Function

Stimulus Breakdown:
Conclusion: We need a system for charging people to use the roads during rush hour.
Evidence: This will help abate rush hour congestion, which many complain about, because when you get something valuable for nothing, it leads to overconsumption and long lines (as we can learn from free ice cream promotions that end up with long lines).

Answer Anticipation:
Yikes, weird argument. The ice cream discussion is a subsidiary topic, an analogy that's meant to get us to the author's primary purpose, which is to advocate for a rush hour toll.

The claim they're asking us about is prefaced by "We learn from this that ..." We can tell from that wording that the author is deriving a conclusion. Since the ice cream discussion is only a means of getting to the ultimate rush hour toll, we know that this conclusion can't be the Main Conclusion. Thus, it's fair to call it a subsidiary conclusion.

It's used to support the main conclusion (since you get overconsumption and long lines when something valuable is free, we should charge people money to drive at rush hour in order to abate overconsumption / long lines). And it has its own support: the first two sentence.

Correct Answer:
D

Answer Choice Analysis:
(A) It isn't rejected. It's used by the author.

(B) It isn't a concession to an opponent. What opponent is there?

(C) It seems like it IS offered as evidence for the main conclusion, since the rush hour toll would be trying to eliminate the overconsumption / long lines of traffic by charging money for something valuable.

(D) YES, I suppose. It is a general claim .. "When SOMETHING valuable costs no money ..." and it is used to support the conclusion.

(E) No, the overall conclusion is "we need a rush hour toll".

Takeaway/Pattern: The claim we're being tested on happens to be a subsidiary (intermediate) conclusion, but there's no guarantee that the correct answer will use that wording. We're ultimately just judging these answers by the standard of, "Does this match?" The four wrong answers had parts that didn't match, while (D) says two things about the claim, both of which are true.

#officialexplanation