SajjadAhmad wrote:
Source: McGraw Hills GMAT
The city council of Greensville has passed a new law in an effort to relieve the city’s overworked sanitation department. Businesses in Greenville have taken to depositing their trash in the bins provided for the public litter. By quickly overfilling these trash cans with commercial waste, the practice forces the sanitation department to work overtime in order to clear them. The new law, however, imposes a $250 fine on any business caught placing its trash in public receptacles.
The argument above relies on which of the following assumptions?
A. The public will not place litter in bins already overflowing with waste from businesses.
B. The sanitation department does have enough workers to empty the trash bins in a timely fashion.
C. The amount of the fine and the risk of getting caught are sufficiently high enough to deter business owners from using public trash bins.
D. Clearing out public trash receptacles is the sanitation department’s most important job.
E. Businesses typically pay private companies to remove the excessive amount of trash they generate.
Dear
SajjadAhmad,
I'm happy to respond.
This is a poorly constructed question. The prompt doesn't really present a proper argument. It's as if a conclusion is missing from the prompt. I think the author meant for the first sentence to imply a kind of conclusion, but read literally, it's simply a factual statement about the new law's intent. It is an indisputable fact that the
intent of the law was "
to relieve the city’s overworked sanitation department"--that's not at all a matter of debate. Whether they law will actually be effective in doing what it was intended to do--that's the real issue here, but that is not made clear in the argument. It's as if someone who really didn't understand the GMAT that well were trying to write a challenging question, and instead, they simply wrote a poor question. A question that is unclear because it's poorly written is not at all challenging in the same way in which official CR questions are challenging.
Let's assume the prompt were better written, and had at end a proper conclusion such as
"
Once this new law goes into effect, it will drastically reduce the number of overtime hours that the city's sanitation workers will have to work."
That's a prediction, not evidence, a genuine conclusion that can be supported by an assumption. We can use the
Negation Test.
A.
The public will not place litter in bins already overflowing with waste from businesses.It sounds as if the large amounts of commercial waste is the big problem. Whether or not a private citizen tosses in, say, an extra soda cup on top of that is not the make-or-break issue. This is not correct.
B.
The sanitation department does have enough workers to empty the trash bins in a timely fashion.Hard to say. It sounds as if the department has enough to do their legally defined job, but if corporations are creating more work for them, it's not enough. Ambiguous, so this is not correct.
C.
The amount of the fine and the risk of getting caught are sufficiently high enough to deter business owners from using public trash bins.Bingo! If we negate this, then the businesses essentially can ignore law, and it will have no effect. Negating this destroys the argument, so this is an assumption.
D.
Clearing out public trash receptacles is the sanitation department’s most important job.Unclear. This is not correct.
E.
Businesses typically pay private companies to remove the excessive amount of trash they generate.We don't know how this works. This is not correct.
Once we improve the prompt, the best answer is (C).
Does all this make sense?
Mike
_________________
Mike McGarry
Magoosh Test PrepEducation is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. — William Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939)