2022 CSAT — Q22

Locate. This is a valid-assumptions question: find the argument’s load-bearing step. The passage’s prescription: “Extending to the smallholders and subsistence farmers of Africa and Asia the best of today’s agricultural practices… would lead to a greatly increased availability of food,” plus “things like better roads and storage facilities, to allow for the carriage of surpluses to markets and reduce wastage.”

Test (negation test). Statement 1 — “poor countries need to bring about change in their existing farming techniques.” Run the negation: if smallholders’ existing techniques needed no change, then “extending the best of today’s practices” to them would add nothing — the passage’s own prediction of “greatly increased availability of food” would fail. The argument requires St.1; it is the unstated premise the prescription leans on. VALID. Statement 2 — “developed countries have better infrastructure and they waste less food.” The passage calls for better roads and storage in general to reduce wastage; it makes no comparison between developed and developing countries’ infrastructure, and never says developed countries waste less. This is a new, comparative claim the argument never invokes, bringing in a comparison the passage doesn’t make. INVALID.

Eliminate by anatomy. (b)/(c) seat Statement 2 — a claim that brings in something the passage doesn’t: a passage about improving infrastructure everywhere misread as a comparative ranking of developed-vs-developing. (d) wrongly drops the genuinely load-bearing St.1. The transferable rule: an assumption is valid only if the argument needs it — St.1 is needed (negating it breaks the food-output prediction), St.2 is a free-floating comparison the passage never makes. Key: (a).

Statement 1 — “Extending to the smallholders and subsistence farmers of Africa and Asia the best of today’s agricultural practices, in such simple matters as how much fertilizers to apply and when, would lead to a greatly increased availability of food”: the argument that extending best practices to poor-country farmers raises food output PRESUMES their existing techniques need improving — negate it (their techniques need no change) and the prescription collapses → VALID (load-bearing assumption). Statement 2 — the passage urges “better roads and storage facilities… to reduce wastage” as a general need; it never makes the COMPARATIVE claim that developed countries have better infrastructure or waste less food. “Developed countries waste less food” adds entities/a comparison absent from the text → ENTITY/out-of-scope fails → INVALID. → (a).

The passage argues that giving poor-country smallholders today’s best practices (right fertilizer amounts and timing, better roads and storage) would sharply raise food availability and cut wastage.

Statement 1 is the assumption that prescription rests on: for “extending the best practices” to help, those farmers’ current techniques must be improvable — i.e., need change. Negate it and the whole recommendation is pointless. Valid.

Statement 2 introduces a comparative claim — developed countries have better infrastructure and waste less — that the passage neither states nor needs. The passage’s infrastructure point is a universal “better roads and storage reduce wastage,” not a developed-vs-developing contrast. Invalid.

Answer: (a) 1 only.

The clean separator is the negation test. Negating St.1 (“existing techniques need no change”) kills the passage’s prediction that extending best practices raises food output — so St.1 is assumed. Negating St.2 (“developed countries don’t waste less”) leaves the argument fully intact — the passage never leaned on a developed-vs-developing comparison. Valid assumptions are the ones the argument cannot do without; that is St.1 alone. (a).