Most of the power plants dispose of their waste water, used to cool the plant, in wastelands or dried up rivers. Central water research institute, which monitors underground water quality for its consistency, report that uranium makes up for an ever increasing percentage of water pollutants in samples the institute collect. Hence, the efforts to decrease the amount of uranium in waste water that power plants dispose without treating are yielding no results.

Which of the following statements most seriously weakens the argument.

a.)The government has already spent millions of $$ to check contamination of ground water by uranium.
b.)The powerplants are now switching to better technologies which result in almost negligible uranium waste.
c.)With the application of various governement initatives to check water pollution,the proportion of major water pollutants such as arsenic, fluorides which used to be reported earlier has been considerably reduced.
d.)While the percentage of power produced by power plants has increased, the amount of uranium used is unchanged.
e.)Because uranium is radioactive in nature,most of the power plants are using certain technologies that can control and limit uranium's radioactivity.
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a.)The government has already spent millions of $$ to check contamination of ground water by uranium. -> doesnt matter what govt has already spent.
b.)The powerplants are now switching to better technologies which result in almost negligible uranium waste - I found this a good contender but then it says the efforts have reduced after what power plants dispose off, without treating.
c.)With the application of various governement initatives to check water pollution,the proportion of major water pollutants such as arsenic, fluorides which used to be reported earlier has been considerably reduced.- gives an alternate route to understand why the % of uranium has increased ( this is because all other pollutants have reduced )
d.)While the percentage of power produced by power plants has increased, the amount of uranium used is unchanged. - doesn't give us anything substantial
e.)Because uranium is radioactive in nature,most of the power plants are using certain technologies that can control and limit uranium's radioactivity. - out of scope literally !

I went for B initially but then on reading the question again I came down the correct choice C.
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Hey, we need not worry that power factories are now switching to better methods to reduce uranium waste.
The stem talks about those factories, which produce waste without treating and what measures do govt take to reduce the % of uranium among the pollutants?

Make sense?
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You want something, go get it . Period !

Report says that uranium makes up for an ever increasing percentage of water pollutants (i.e. the % of uranium in the total amount of pollutants is increasing). Note here that it doesn't say that % of uranium in water samples is increasing.
e.g. if uranium made up 2% of the total pollutants before, it now makes up 3% of the total pollutants.
What is happening to the % of total pollutants in the water is not known.

Conclusion: Efforts to decrease the amount of uranium are not working.

We want to weaken the conclusion i.e. we want to show that the efforts could be working.

Option (C) says that the proportion of other major water pollutants is decreasing. This could explain the increase in the proportion of uranium in the pollutants.

Think of values to understand this:

Say, % of total pollutants in the water sample is 5% i.e. in 100 lts of water, there's 5 lts of pollutants.
The 5 lt is made up of uranium, arsenic etc. Say, uranium is 1 lt and the others are 4 lts i.e. uranium is 20% of the total pollutants.
Now what if the amount of other pollutants go down from 4lts to 1 lt due to govt's efforts and amount of uranium goes down from 1 lt to 0.5 lt. The proportion of uranium has gone up to 33% of the total pollutants.
Even though proportion of uranium has increased, the efforts are working since the amount of uranium pollutant went down. Hence we have weakened the conclusion.
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Karishma
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