#22 - Global Reference, Must Be True

[Administrator]

Please post your questions below! Thank you!

[appletree]

Hello,
I picked answer C because all of the other answer choices were very unsupported. However, I am finding a hard time finding good justification for answer C.
The only evidence I could find was at the end of the second paragraph with the sentence "experience shows that harmful pollutants... rarely attempted to remedy this situation."
I can see this supports the idea that nations are not really held accountable because they keep doing the same bad stuff over and over, but saying they are rarely LEGALLY held accountable based on this seems a bit too strong?
Could someone please clarify? Is there some additional evidence I am missing?
Thank you!

[Ryan Twomey]

Hey Appletree,

So this is a great question. And you may already know this, but I always like to reiterate this in the more difficult must be true (most strongly supported) questions in reading comp: they are asking which answer choice is the most strongly supported out of the five, not which answer is definitively true.

But I do think the sentence you point outsupports answer choice C. I will post it here for the other students who view this in the future: "Although systematic empirical studies are lacking, experience shows that harmful pollutants constantly cross most international borders, and that nations have only rarely attempted to remedy this situation."

This was considered a principle by the author in previous sentences, and it has been "rarely" even been attempted to be remedied. The first sentence in paragraph 3 also supports this answer choice.

I don't think this answer choice is by any means 100% certainly true, but based on the passage, I'd give it an 80-90% chance of being true, which is higher than the remaining 4 answer choices, making this answer choice the most strongly supported.

I hope this helps, and I wish you all of the luck in your studies.

Best,
Ryan

[domthedestroyer]

Why is D wrong? I figured that the main reason a country would be seen as "violating" an international environmental law is because they don't adopt that law as one of their own. And they're able to get away with it because these laws are unenforceable since there's no agreement. The last 3 sentences of Paragraph 3 kind of support this. The author basically says that countries can engage in "environmental law wars" where they criticize other nations by saying "Hey, look! This country is bad for not following this specific environmental law!" Meanwhile, that other country doesn't even recognize that law as law. The last sentence of that paragraph says "[these norms] merely represent some collective ideals." I took this to mean that there's a general group of norms found across countries, but each country might only recognize a few of them with some overlap. As a result, countries may engage in activities that seem to "violate" laws from other nations' standpoints, but are actually completely legal to the violating country.

And as for the word "most" in the answer choice, I figured that the main reason the violations would be happening would be for the reasons stated above. Why would a country have a law just to violate it? Sure, it may happen as stated in Paragraph 2, but I figured most nations who were violating certain norms would just not have that norm as one of their officially stated norms.

As for C, I don't see how you can infer that nations aren't held legally accountable just because they don't remedy the situation. In real life, the International Criminal Court can hold individuals legally accountable for committing war crimes, but don't have the power to bring about a remedy (trying the individual in a tribunal) if say, the host nation in which the individual resides refuses to give him up. So you could theoretically see instances of a lack of a remedy where there IS legal accountability. I believe inferring otherwise, as you would have to with choice C, is rather erroneous. Thoughts?