LSAT 104 – Section 4 – Question 04

LSAT 104 - Section 4 - Question 04

December 1998

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Question
QuickView		 Type Tags Answer
Choices		 Curve Question
Difficulty		 Psg/Game/S
Difficulty		 Explanation
PT104 S4 Q04
+LR
Necessary assumption +NA
Link Assumption +LinkA
A
0%
157
B
0%
146
C
1%
150
D
98%
168
E
0%
153
135
140
146
 +Easier 147.438 +SubsectionMedium

Mayor: Citing the severity of the city’s winters, the city road commissioner has suggested paving our roads with rubberized asphalt, since the pressure of passing vehicles would cause the rubber to flex, breaking up ice on roads and so making ice removal easier and less of a strain on the road-maintenance budget. However, rubberized asphalt is more expensive than plain asphalt and the city’s budget for building and maintaining roads cannot be increased. Therefore, the commissioner’s suggestion is not financially feasible.

Summary
The mayor concludes that it’s not financially feasible to pave the city’s roads with rubberized asphalt, which would make winter ice removal easier and less expensive. Why not? Because rubberized asphalt is more expensive than regular asphalt—and the city cannot increase its budget to build and maintain roads.

Notable Assumptions
For the argument to make sense, the mayor must assume that using rubberized asphalt would require increasing the city’s road budget, despite any cost savings during winter ice removal. In other words, the necessary assumption is that rubberized asphalt would increase costs by a greater amount than the savings it would create.

A
Using rubberized asphalt to pave roads would not have any advantages besides facilitating the removal of ice on roads.
The mayor isn’t arguing that rubberized asphalt wouldn’t be beneficial, just that it wouldn’t fit in the budget. It’s not necessary that there be no other advantages.
B
The severity of winters in the region in which the city is located does not vary significantly from year to year.
Whether the city’s winters vary in severity doesn’t affect the argument—even if some winters were much more severe than others, the argument would still make sense.
C
It would cost more to add particles of rubber to asphalt than to add particles of rubber to other materials that are used to pave roads.
The mayor’s conclusion that rubberized asphalt wouldn’t fit in the city’s budget can stand whether or not asphalt is more expensive to rubberize than other road materials. That means this is irrelevant.
D
Savings in the cost of ice removal would not pay for the increased expense of using rubberized asphalt to pave roads.
In other words, rubberized asphalt would overall increase the city’s spending on roads. If we negated this, and the savings matched or outweighed the costs, then the mayor’s conclusion would be unsupported—making this necessary to assume.
E
The techniques the city currently uses for removing ice from city roads are not the least expensive possible, given the type of road surface in place.
The city’s ability to save money on ice removal is irrelevant, except for how it compares to the cost of rubberized asphalt. This doesn’t get to the mayor’s assumption that that cost would exceed ice removal savings, so it’s not necessary to assume.

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LSAT PrepTest 104 Explanations

Section 1 - Logical Reasoning

Section 2 - Reading Comprehension

Section 3 - Reading Comprehension

Section 4 - Logical Reasoning

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