Questions 20-21
So-called environmentalists have argued that the proposed Golden Lake Development would interfere with bird-migration patterns. However, the fact that these same people have raised environmental objections to virtually every development proposal brought before the council in recent years indicates that their expressed concern for bird-migration patterns is nothing but a mask for their antidevelopment, antiprogress agenda. Their claim, therefore, should be dismissed without further consideration.
20. Which one of the following questionable argumentative techniques is employed in the passage？
（A） taking the failure of a given argument to establish its conclusion as the basis for claiming that the view expressed by that conclusion is false.
（B） rejecting the conclusion of an argument on the basis of a claim about the motives of those advancing the argument
（C） using a few exceptional cases as the basis for a claim about what is true in general
（D） misrepresenting evidence that supports the position the argument is intended to refute.
（E） assuming that what is true of a group as a whole is necessarily true of each member of that group
21. For the claim that the concern expressed by the so-called environmentalists is not their real concern to be properly drawn on the basis of the evidence cited, which one of the following must be assumed？
（A） Not every development proposal opposed in recent years by these so-called environmentalists was opposed because they believed it to pose a threat to the environment
（B） People whose real agenda is to block development wherever it is proposed always try to disguise their true motives.
（C） Anyone who opposes unrestricted development is an opponent of progress.
（D） The council has no reason to object to the proposed Golden Lake Development other than concern about the development's effect on bird-migration patterns.
（E） When people say that they oppose a development project solely on environmental grounds, their real concern almost always lies elsewhere.
22. Psychologists today recognize childhood as a separate stage of life which can only be understood in its own terms, and they wonder why the Western world took so long to see the folly of regarding children simply as small, inadequately socialized adults. Most psychologists, however, persist in regarding people 70 to 90 years old as though they were 35 year olds who just happen to have white hair and extra leisure time. But old age is as fundamentally different from young adulthood and middle age as childhood is——a fact attested to by the organization of modern social and economic life. Surely it is time, therefore, to acknowledge that serious research into the unique psychology of advanced age has become indispensable.
Which one of the following principles, if established, would provide the strongest backing for the argument？
（A） Whenever current psychological practice conflicts with traditional attitudes toward people, those traditional attitudes should be changed to bring them in line with current psychological practice.
（B） Whenever two groups of people are so related to each other that any member of the second group must previously have been a member of the first, people in the first group should not be regarded simply as deviant members of the second group.
（C） Whenever most practitioners of a given discipline approach a particular problem in the same way, that uniformity is good evidence that all similar problems should also be approached in that way.
（D） Whenever a society's economic life is so organized that two distinct times of life are treated as being fundamentally different from one another, each time of life can be understood only in terms of its own distinct psychology.
（E） Whenever psychologists agree that a single psychology is inadequate for two distinct age groups, they should be prepared to show that there are greater differences between the two age groups than there are between individuals in the same age group.
23. Sabina： The words used in expressing facts affect neither the facts nor the conclusions those facts will support. Moreover, if the words are clearly defined and consistently used, the actual words chosen make no difference to an argument's soundness. Thus, how an argument is expressed can have no bearing on whether it is a good argument.
Emile： Badly chosen words can make even the soundest argument a poor one. After all, many words have social and political connotations that influence people's response to claims expressed in those words, regardless of how carefully and explicitly those words are defined. Since whether people will acknowledge a fact is affected by how the fact is expressed, the conclusions they actually draw are also affected.
The point at issue between Emile and Sabina is whether
（A） defining words in one way rather than another can alter either the facts or the conclusions the facts will justify
（B） a word can be defined without taking into account its social and political connotations
（C） a sound argument in support of a given conclusion is a better argument than any unsound argument for that same conclusion
（D） it would be a good policy to avoid using words that are likely to lead people either to misunderstand the claims being made or to reason badly about those claims
（E） a factor that affects neither the truth of an argument's premises nor the logical relation between its premises and its conclusion can cause an argument to be a bad one
24. Most disposable plastic containers are now labeled with a code number （from 1 to 9） indicating the type or quality of the plastic. Plastics with the lowest code numbers are the easiest for recycling plants to recycle and are thus the most likely to be recycles after use rather than dumped in landfills. Plastics labeled with the highest numbers are only rarely recycled.
Consumers can make a significant long-term reduction in the amount of waste that goes unrecycled, therefore, by refusing to purchase those products packaged in plastic containers labeled with the highest code numbers.
Which one of the following, if true, most seriously undermines the conclusion above？
（A） The cost of collecting, sorting, and recycling discarded plastics is currently higher than the cost of manufacturing new plastics from virgin materials.
（B） Many consumers are unaware of the codes that are stamped on the plastic containers.
（C） A plastic container almost always has a higher code number after it is recycled than it had before recycling because the recycling process causes a degradation of the quality of the plastic.
（D） Products packaged in plastics with the lowest code numbers are often more expensive than those packaged in the higher-numbered plastics.
（E） Communities that collect all discarded plastic containers for potential recycling later dump in landfills plastics with higher-numbered codes only when it is clear that no recycler will take them.
25. Despite a steady decrease in the average number of hours worked per person per week, the share of the population that reads a daily newspaper has declined greatly in the past 20 years. But the percentage of the population that watches television daily has shown a similarly dramatic increase over the same period. Clearly, increased television viewing has caused a simultaneous decline in newspaper reading.
Which one of the following, if true, would be most damaging to the explanation given above for the decline in newspaper reading？
（A） There has been a dramatic increase over the past 20 years in the percentage of people who tell polltakers that television is their primary source of information about current events.
（B） Of those members of the population who do not watch television, the percentage who read a newspaper every day has also shown a dramatic decrease.
（C） The time people spend with the books and newspapers they read has increased, on average, from 1 to 3 hours per week in the past 20 years.
（D） People who spend large amounts of time each day watching television are less able to process and remember printed information than are those who do not watch television.
（E） A typical television set is on 6 hours a day down from an average of 6 1/2 hours a day 5 years ago.
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