Question explanation

@wills, Happy to help. The conclusion of the stimulus is the first sentence. If you're stuck and can't figure out the conclusion between two sentences, a good trick is to put the word "because" in between the sentences and then see which way makes more sense. The position that punishment should be proportional to how serious the offense is but that repeat offenders should receive harsher punishments than first-time offenders is unsustainable BECAUSE this would make determining the seriousness of an offense so difficult that it would be impossible to apply the proportionality principle. Here, the first sentence is before "because" and it makes sense because the last sentence provides support. This would make determining the seriousness of an offense so difficult that it would be impossible to apply the proportionality principle BECAUSE the position that punishment should be proportional to how serious the offense is but that repeat offenders should receive harsher punishments than first-time offenders is unsustainable. Here, the last sentence is before "because," but it doesn't make sense. This is how we know that the first sentence is the main conclusion; it's what the whole stimulus is working to support. The question asks, "The statement that considerations as remote as what an offender did years ago are relevant to the seriousness of an offense plays which one of the following roles in the argument?" Now that we know the conclusion, let's look at the phrase in question. We see that it's discussing an indefensible consequence of the position that the overall conclusion is rejecting, which leads us to (D). Hope this helps. Let us know if you have any more questions!

I understood the conclusion but got the question wrong. I picked A . Can you please outline this further? I'm struggling with the vagueness of the answers I think.