You are viewing a free preview of this lesson.
Subscribe to unlock all 10 lessons in this course and every other course on LearningBro.
This final lesson brings together every skill from this course — strengthening, weakening, evaluating justification, comparing arguments, and ranking logical impact — through worked examples using full LNAT-style passages. Each passage is followed by multiple questions that test different aspects of argument evaluation. Work through each one systematically before checking the answers.
"The United Kingdom should replace short prison sentences — those of six months or less — with mandatory community service orders. The evidence is compelling: reoffending rates for prisoners serving short sentences stand at 65%, compared to 35% for those given community sentences. Short prison terms are too brief for meaningful rehabilitation but long enough to expose offenders to criminal networks, disrupt employment, and damage family relationships. By contrast, community service allows offenders to maintain their jobs, family connections, and stable housing — all factors associated with reduced reoffending.
Critics argue that community sentences are too lenient and fail to reflect the seriousness of the crime. However, justice should be measured by outcomes, not by appearances. If community sentences reduce reoffending and produce fewer future victims, they serve justice more effectively than a system that makes the public feel reassured but produces worse results."
Which of the following, if true, would most strengthen the argument?
A. Community service is cheaper to administer than imprisonment. B. A randomised trial in which offenders convicted of similar offences were assigned to either short prison sentences or community service orders found that, after three years, the community service group had a reoffending rate 28 percentage points lower than the prison group, even after controlling for offence type, criminal history, age, and socioeconomic background. C. Most offenders serving short sentences are convicted of non-violent offences. D. Public opinion polls show increasing support for alternatives to prison.
Answer: B. The argument's key assumption is that the difference in reoffending rates is caused by the type of sentence rather than by differences between the types of offenders who receive each sentence. A randomised trial with controls eliminates this confounding factor, directly supporting the causal claim. Option A concerns cost (implementation), Option C provides context but does not strengthen the causal claim, and Option D is an appeal to popularity.
Which of the following, if true, would most weaken the argument?
A. Some community service roles are physically demanding. B. Magistrates who impose community sentences rather than short prison terms tend to do so for offenders they judge to be lower risk — meaning that the lower reoffending rate for community sentences may reflect judicial selection of less dangerous offenders rather than the effectiveness of the sentence itself. C. Community service does not involve any form of counselling or therapy. D. The public perceives community sentences as a "soft option".
Answer: B. This identifies the crucial confounding factor: judicial selection. If magistrates assign community sentences to lower-risk offenders, the difference in reoffending rates may reflect the offenders' characteristics, not the sentence's effectiveness. This directly undermines the argument's causal claim. Option D concerns public perception, not effectiveness. Option C raises a limitation but does not address the comparative claim. Option A is irrelevant.
The author's response to the criticism that community sentences are "too lenient" is:
A. A red herring that changes the subject from leniency to outcomes. B. A legitimate reframing of the debate — the author argues that justice should be measured by results (reduced reoffending, fewer victims) rather than by the perceived severity of punishment, directly engaging with the critics' underlying concern about justice. C. A straw man that misrepresents the critics' position. D. An appeal to consequences that avoids addressing the moral dimension.
Answer: B. The author directly engages with the criticism by offering an alternative framework for evaluating justice — outcomes rather than severity. This is a legitimate philosophical move: redefining the criterion by which sentences should be judged. It is not a deflection but a substantive counter-argument.
"The current system of tuition fees and student loans in England is unsustainable. The government lends approximately £20 billion per year to students, yet projections indicate that around 45% of this lending will never be repaid. Graduates in lower-paid professions — teachers, nurses, social workers — will have their remaining debts written off after thirty years, meaning the taxpayer bears the cost. Meanwhile, graduates in lucrative fields such as finance and consultancy repay their loans quickly and face no further contribution.
A graduate tax would be fairer and more efficient. Under this model, all graduates would pay a fixed percentage of their income above a threshold for a set period after graduation. Those who earn more would pay more in total; those who earn less would pay less. The current loan system creates the illusion of individual repayment whilst functioning, in practice, as a poorly designed graduate tax with an arbitrary thirty-year cutoff.
Some object that a graduate tax would penalise high earners who have already repaid the cost of their education. But this objection misunderstands the nature of the proposal: the tax would replace the loan system entirely, and the rate would be set to ensure that total contributions are broadly comparable to what graduates currently repay — simply distributed more equitably."
The argument for a graduate tax assumes:
A. All graduates earn enough to pay some tax. B. That a fixed-percentage tax with a set duration can be calibrated to raise approximately the same total revenue as the current loan system whilst distributing the burden more equitably — and that the administrative and political costs of transitioning to a new system would not outweigh the benefits. C. That high-earning graduates would not object to paying more. D. That the current loan system will collapse.
Answer: B. The argument claims the graduate tax would be "fairer and more efficient" but assumes it can be calibrated to work as intended. If the numbers do not add up — if a fair rate raises too little revenue, or if a revenue-neutral rate is unfairly high — the proposal fails. The transition costs are also assumed to be manageable.
Which of the following, if true, would most weaken the argument?
A. Some graduates emigrate and would be difficult to tax. B. Economic modelling by the Institute for Fiscal Studies found that any graduate tax rate sufficient to match current loan repayment revenue would require middle-earning graduates (teachers, nurses, police officers) to pay significantly more over their lifetimes than they currently repay under the loan system — meaning the proposed reform would make the system less fair for the very group it claims to help. C. The current loan system has been in place since 2012 and is well understood by applicants. D. Universities oppose the graduate tax because it would give the government more control over funding.
Subscribe to continue reading
Get full access to this lesson and all 10 lessons in this course.