After a string of bear attacks, the town of Salmon Falls decided

Question

After a string of bear attacks, the town of Salmon Falls decided to close its garbage processing center located on the outskirts of town and move its refuse to a new processing location on an island located three miles offshore. Over the past two years, 30 residents of Salmon Falls were victims of bear attacks, but in the two months since the garbage processing center was moved no bear attacks were reported. Clearly, moving the processing center offshore has made it less likely that residents of Salmon Falls will be attacked by bears.

Which of the following, if true, most strengthens the claim made above?

A. The number of bear attacks is in a given area is directly proportional to the frequency of human-bear encounters in that area. 
B. Due to budgetary constraints, Salmon Falls had to cancel its public safety campaign on how to prevent bear attacks.
C. Bears generally hibernate for up to five months every year.
D. A number of the bears that lived near Salmon Falls were relocated last year.
E. Most of the bear attacks over the past two years occurred because a resident had startled an unsuspecting bear.

UTN · Answer

Please explain why the first option is not the preferred answer.

cristianov · Answer

The first option (A) is a direct consequence of the move of the garbage processing center, thus confirms the conclusion of the statement.
The second option (B) strengthens the claim, because, logically by cancelling the public safety campaign on how to prevent bear attacks should lead to an increase of attacks.

ada453 · Answer

A public safety campaign on how to prevent bear attacks could have also resulted in decreased bear attacks. Removing this from the equation, means that the decrease in bear attacks was only a result of the facility relocation.

rahul6019 · Answer

Choice A is a trap as it says nothing about how change in location(cause) let to decrease in attacks(effect). It simply states a fact.

Choice C is correct as it weakens alternate cause.

shrik · Answer

when we strengthen any argument we always try to fill the loop holes by making our argument airtight. also when we strengthen we show only given cause can produce given effect.

ALSO BY STATING NO ANY CAUSE PRODUCES THIS EFFECT WE CAN MAKE OUR ARGUMENT AIRTIGHT ANY HENCE STRENGTHEN IT. AND OPTION B DOES THE SAME.

ParthSanghavi · Answer

VeritasKarishma   VeritasPrepBrian

Kindly share your views on this.
I fail to understand how (B) strengthens the the argument claim that 'moving the processing center offshore has decreased bear attacks.'

Looking at the argument, we can conclude that the bears were attracted to the garbage center located in the outskirts of town. It was most likely here that bear attacks occurred.

(E) tells us the reason why bear attacks occurred because people were unaware of a bear in their vicinity and unintentionally startled them, causing the bear to lash out in self defense.

(B) talks about a PSA to prevent bear attacks. How does this strengthen?

VeritasPrepBrian · Answer

Yeah, really good question. The case I'd make for (B) is that it gives you a reason to expect that bear attacks would have INCREASED (they cut the programs to teach people how to avoid them, so you'd expect if anything there would be more attacks with fewer people knowing how to avoid them), so the fact that bear attacks actually INCREASED gives a little more credence to the idea that whatever else changed in the meantime (moving the garbage center) must have had a positive impact.

Now...I'd say that's one of the weaker strengtheners I've seen- it doesn't get close to proving that the garage move was the cause of the decrease - but that's the case for how it helps add at least a little value to the argument.

Note also that the argument doesn't give any evidence that the garbage center was where any of the attacks happened, or even what lured the bears into town. That's where I'd be really skeptical of (E) - we don't have any link between "bear attacks" and "garbage center," so (E) describing why the bear attacks happen but not linking them to the garbage center doesn't really move the argument along at all.

ParthSanghavi · Answer

VeritasPrepBrian

Thanks for the clarification

JS1290 · Answer

Hi  VeritasPrepBrian ,

Thank you for explaining the correct reasoning behind option B. Could you also please explain why option A is incorrect?

VeritasPrepBrian · Answer

Good question - note that the part of (A) that connects to the conclusion is "bear attacks," and then what (A) adds is "bear attacks are directly proportional to human-bear interactions." But you don't have anything in the stimulus that connects to "human-bear interactions" - that part of (A) doesn't link to anything in our current knowledge base from the paragraph. If we knew that the garbage processing facility was a place of frequent human-bear interaction then (A) would connect the facts to the conclusion, but we don't know that a single human-bear interaction ever took place at or near the facility, so (A) doesn't help us.

AKY13 · Answer

Hi Brian
 
I have few doubts to be clarified.

Even in B, we don't know how many people attend this program or whether the program is effective in preventing bear attacks or do people ALREADY know everything to prevent bear attack since the training/awareness program is conducted every year etc.

I have another for E; E says that people get attacked by an unsuspected bear. 
I feel it is safe to assume(one need not be an environment engineer to assume so) that garbage processing centres have multiple heaps of garbage(processed as well as unprocessed, different types such as plastic, paper, metal etc.); these garbage heaps block view & one can't see a bear sitting behind the heaps. 
So when we moved the processing centre away from the place of attack, we gave a full view of road/passage/section of the old location of processing centre & hence people could easily spot a bear & averted any attack by taking necessary action.

So E basically says gives us a reason for attacks which has been eliminated by the action of relocating the centre(hence removing the heaps)

I agree that I may be assuming little more for E to be an answer but I feel B also doesn't seem to be strong enough due to the lack of some info as mentioned above in 2nd para.

With all Due Respect

Arro44 · Answer

As this one seems to cause quite some confusion, try to make it simple:

A: While this could be right, it is quite irrelevant when evaluating our argument

B: Less information about prevention should logically lead to more bear attacks, however, as this is not the case we can assume the relocation of the processing plant is working.

Best regards,
Chris

Divijakanneganty · Answer

A. The number of bear attacks is in a given area is directly proportional to the frequency of human-bear encounters in that area. 
 So what? We don't know whether moving the garbage Processing center has reduced or increased human-bear encounters. 
B. Due to budgetary constraints, Salmon Falls had to cancel its public safety campaign on how to prevent bear attacks.
 So, except for moving the processing centers nothing has been done additionally to help public prevent bear attacks 
C. Bears generally hibernate for up to five months every year. 
This doesn't support the conclusion but creates a slight doubt on whether the relocation or the hibernation period that reduced the bear attacks. 
D. A number of the bears that lived near Salmon Falls were relocated last year.
 Directly weakens our conclusion by bringing another reason 
E. Most of the bear attacks over the past two years occurred because a resident had startled an unsuspecting bear.
 Then why didn't we observe any difference in the bear attacks until the processing center has been moved?

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After a string of bear attacks, the town of Salmon Falls decided

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