Nihit wrote:
It is repeatedly claimed that the dumping of nuclear waste poses no threat to people living nearby. If this claim could be made with certainty, there would be no reason for not locating sites in areas of dense population. But the policy of dumping nuclear waste only in the more sparsely populated regions indicates, at the very least, some misgiving about safety on the part of those responsible for policy.
Which one of the following, if true, would most seriously weaken the argument?
A. Evaluation plans in the event of an accident could not be guaranteed to work perfectly except where the population is small.
B. In the event of an accident, it is certain that fewer people would be harmed in a sparsely populated than in a densely populated area.
C. Dumping of nuclear waste poses fewer economic and bureaucratic problems in sparsely populated than in densely populated areas.
D. There are dangers associated with chemical waste, and it, too, is dumped away from areas of dense population.
E. Until there is no shred of doubt that nuclear dumps are safe, it makes sense to situate them where they pose the least threat to the public.
Source: LSAT
I think the conclusion here is an implicit one: "dumping nuclear waste may pose some threat to people living nearby".
Whenever an argument begins with an ascription such as "it is repeatedly claimed", "it is often assumed", "many people believe", etc. ... 98% of the time the author's purpose/conclusion is to disagree with that initial claims.
So when I see the claim of "dumping nuclear waste poses no threat to people living nearby", I see the author's conclusion as: "we should doubt this claim".
why should we doubt this claim?
If ppl REALLY believed that dumping waste was harmless, then waste sites would be located in areas of dense population.
But since these sites seem to only be cropping up in sparse areas, I guess there really IS suspicion of danger.
the correct answer (C) effectively undermines the truth of the conditional in the 2nd sentence. (C) suggests that "even if nuclear waste sites were certain to pose no threat, there would STILL be good reasons for putting them in sparse rather than dense areas".
===other answers
(A), (B), and (D) are all strengthening the argument by agreeing with the author that the reasons for favoring sparse over dense areas for nuclear waste sites include the possibly of an accident (i.e., these answers suggest that waste sites DO pose some threat to people living nearby)
(D) is technically out of scope, but the gist of it is still in line with how (A) and (B) work.
(E) also seems to strengthen the argument, if anything. It means something slightly different from the 2nd sentence of the stimulus, but it's very close in agreeing with the author's overall sentiment.