A) INCORRECT! The author doesn't actually employ this argumentative strategy as she concedes that it "will impose some hardship". If you read the stimulus carefully, you can see how blatantly wrong this answer choice is.
B) INCORRECT! The author doesn't show that the proponent of "any" alternative would be led into a contradiction. She only discusses two alternatives, not every single alternative out there, so if I came in and said: "lets cut some of the excess "fat" in terms of executive salaries!", I wouldn't be led into a contradiction because the author wouldn't have even addressed my alternative. This is an example of where my upfront work in analyzing the argument before going to the answer choices allowed me to quickly see the glaring issue with this answer choice (i.e. "ANY" alternative) and to rule it out almost instantaneously.
C) CORRECT! The author rules out the "not increasing the fare" alternative by providing the strongly worded negative consequences associated with it, in an attempt to support her conclusion indirectly. Notice how she doesn't present any direct evidence for her prescriptive 40% fare increase conclusion, so this is why "indirectly" makes sense here.
D) INCORRECT! Author doesn't even present this comparison in her argument. She leaves the two courses of action or alternatives relatively apart from one another when considering their disadvantages (some financial hardship on riders vs. "severe" cuts to service and losing an "unacceptably" large amount of riders). Thus, it's impossible for us to say that one would not be subject to the same criticism as the other because no overlap between the disadvantages is even discussed in the passage to begin with.
E) INCORRECT! No form of temporal consistency is discussed or presented in the argument, so this answer can be eliminated very quickly.
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