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Urban planner: When a city loses population due to migration, property taxes in

游客2025-02-25  1
问题 Urban planner: When a city loses population due to migration, property taxes in that city tend to rise. This is because there are then fewer residents paying to maintain an infrastructure that was designed to support more people. Rising property taxes, in turn, drive more residents away, compounding the problem. Since the city of Stonebridge is starting to lose population, the city government should therefore refrain from raising property taxes.
Which of the following, if true, would most weaken the urban planner’s argument?
选项 A、If Stonebridge does not raise taxes on its residents to maintain its infrastructure, the city will become much less attractive to live in as that infrastructure decays.
B、Stonebridge at present benefits from grants provided by the national government to help maintain certain parts of its infrastructure.
C、If there is a small increase in property taxes in Stonebridge and a slightly larger proportion of total revenue than at present is allocated to infrastructure maintenance, the funding will be adequate for that purpose.
D、Demographers project that the population of a region that includes Stonebridge will start to increase substantially within the next several years.
E、The property taxes in Stonebridge are significantly lower than those in many larger cities.
答案 A
解析 Argument Evaluation
Situation When a city loses population due to migration, fewer residents remain to pay to maintain the city’s infrastructure, so property taxes tend to rise. These rising property taxes then drive even more residents away. The city of Stonebridge is starting to lose population, so Stonebridge’s government should not raise property taxes.
Reasoning What would weaken the urban planner’s justification for concluding that Stonebridge’s government should refrain from raising property taxes? The urban planner implicitly reasons that raising property taxes in Stonebridge in order to maintain the city’s infrastructure would make the city lose even more residents, leaving even fewer paying to maintain the infrastructure, and that this would worsen the funding problem the tax increase would have been intended to solve. The urban planner’s argument would be weakened by any evidence that raising property taxes in Stonebridge would not drive residents away or that refraining from raising property taxes would cause the same problems as raising them would cause, or worse.
A Correct. This suggests that refraining from raising property taxes could drive more residents out of Stonebridge than raising them would, and thus would not help the city avoid the problem the urban planner describes.
B This does slightly weaken the argument because the grants may still be provided to maintain certain parts of the infrastructure, even if increased property taxes drive more residents away. But losing more residents could still make it harder to raise enough funds to maintain the rest of the city’s infrastructure, as the urban planner argues.
C Even if this approach would address the immediate maintenance funding problem, the small increase in property taxes could still drive more residents away, forcing additional future tax increases on those who remain, just as the urban planner suggests.
D This does slightly weaken the argument, but the residents who will move to the region might still avoid moving to Stonebridge if the property taxes there are too high, and those who live in Stonebridge might still move to other cities in the region. E Residents fleeing Stonebridge because of high property taxes would likely avoid moving to the many larger cities with even higher property taxes, but they might be happy to move to many other places with low property taxes.
The correct answer is A.
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