Reading through Premises and Conclusions

Topic 1 Reading Exercises from:
Copi, Irving M. Introduction to Logic, 14th Edition. Routledge.
Chapter 1
INSTRUCTIONS
Identify the premises and conclusions in the following passages. Some premises do support the conclusion; others do not. Note that premises may support conclusions directly or indirectly and that even simple passages may contain more than one argument.
Example Problem
A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
—The Constitution of the United States, Amendment 2
Example Solution
Premise: A well-regulated militia is necessary for the security of a free state.Conclusion: The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
PROBLEMS
5. Standardized tests have a disparate racial and ethnic impact; white andAsian students score, on average, markedly higher than their black andHispanic peers. This is true for fourth-grade tests, college entranceexams, and every other assessment on the books. If a racial gap is evidenceof discrimination, then all tests discriminate.
—Abigail Thernstrom, “Testing, the Easy Target,” The New York Times, 15 January 2000
Premise: Standardized tests have a disparate racial and ethnic impact; white and Asian students score, on average, markedly higher than their black and Hispanic peers. This is true for fourth-grade tests, college entrance exams, and every other assessment on the books.Conclusion: If a racial gap is evidence of discrimination, then all tests discriminate.
6. Good sense is, of all things in the world, the most equally distributed, for everybody thinks him so abundantly provided with it that even those most difficult to please in all other matters do not commonly desiremore of it than they already possess.
—René Descartes, A Discourse on Method, 1637
Premise: “Everybody thinks himself so abundantly provided with it that even those most difficult to please in all other matters do not commonly desire more of it than they already possess”.
Conclusion: Good sense is, of all things in the world, the most equally distributed
7. When Noah Webster proposed a Dictionary of the American Language, hisearly 19th-century critics presented the following argument against it:“Because any words new to the United States are either stupid or foreign,there is no such thing as the American language; there’s just bad.
English.”
—Jill Lepore, “Noah’s Mark,” The New Yorker, 6 November 2006
Premise: When Noah Webster proposed a Dictionary of the American Language, his early 19th-century critics presented the following argument against it:“Because any words new to the United States are either stupid or foreignConclusion: there is no such thing as the American language , there’s just bad English
8. The death penalty is too costly. In New York State alone taxpayers spentmore than $200 million in our state’s failed death penalty experiment,with no one executed.In addition to being too costly, capital punishment is unfair in its application.The strongest reason remains the epidemic of exonera...