Lesson: Challenging Critical/Logical Reasoning - 10t01

Reasoning Classics: The Causal Argument, continued

The rate of violent crime in this state is up 30 percent from last year. The fault lies entirely in our court system: Recently our judges' sentences have been so lenient that criminals can now do almost anything without fear of a long prison term. The argument above would be weakened if it were true that 85 percent of the other states in the nation have lower crime rates than does this state. white collar crime in this state has also increased by over 25 percent in the last year 35 percent of the police in this state have been laid off in the last year due to budget cuts polls show that 65 percent of the population in this state oppose capital punishment the state has hired 25 new judges in the last year to compensate for deaths and retirements.

The author concludes that lenient judges have caused the crime rate to skyrocket. He must be assuming that nothing else could have caused the increase. Choice (C) undermines that assumption by providing an alternate cause — the lack of police. Thus, his argument is weakened. All of the other statements are unrelated to the author's assumption, and thus have no effect on the argument.

Causal arguments crop up frequently in Reasoning. The better you become at managing them, the better the score you will receive on test day.

Now let's look at another Classic.

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