"Is essential"

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  Cant Get Right Yearly + Live Member Sage ⭐ 🍌 7Sage Tutor

  February 26 28111 karma

  You got it.

  A good way to workshop these is to come up with simple, commonsense examples to check against. So with "is essential" we might say: "Water is essential for farming." This is a commonsense statement, and the meaning should resonate as intuitively true. So now try out the two options to translate that to an "if . . . then . . ." statement and see which one seems to mean what we know "Water is essential for farming" means.

  If there's water then there must be farming?
  or
  If there's farming then there must be water.

  With water as the sufficient there is all kinds of problems. I see water without farming every day of my life and it has never challenged the notion that water is essential for farming. There's water on Mars. There's water at the bottom of the Marianas Trench. There's water deep below the Earth's surface. No farming in any of those places. We just don't get farming everywhere there's water. But everywhere there is a farm? Yeah, there's going to be water. Water as the necessary makes sense in the same way that "Water is essential for farming does." If you see a farm, you know there's water involved.

  So that is how "is essential" works. And that is how you can workshop these sorts of problems.
• 1 Like

  natemanwell1 Core Member

  February 26 321 karma

  necessary: need for x to happen, sufficient : makes x happen