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anamexis 4 hours ago

School districts are often supersets of municipalities.

runjake 4 hours ago | parent [-]

This is the correct answer.

From RFC 1386, Section 3.3.1:

  "Public schools are usually organized by districts 
  which can be larger or smaller than a city or county."
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1386#page-12
throw_await 3 hours ago | parent [-]

What a wierd phrasing. It reads to me like it excludes the possibility of it being the same.

staticshock 3 hours ago | parent [-]

"can be" ≠ "must be"

pbhjpbhj 3 hours ago | parent [-]

"can be" is used to list all possible values, which is where the confusion arises. It sounds like: ∀x, x>C v x<C.

"Might be", I think would be better.

wavemode 3 hours ago | parent [-]

"can" can be a synonym for "might" / "may"

(purists would argue that it can't, but common usage trumps purism)

Also, I will point out that, even from the perspective of formal logic, the original statement has "city or county". In other words there is no single fixed C - C could be a city or a country. Since counties can be larger than cities, it stands to reason that a school district could be larger than the size of a city while being equal to the size of a county. And can be smaller than the size of a county while being equal to the size of a city.

So, even assuming that the original statement is taken to have the logical meaning you've interpreted, that meaning does not technically forbid school districts from being equal to the size of a county (as long as that county is larger than some city, so that we can still make the true statement "this district is larger than a city"), nor from being equal to the size of a city (as long as that city is smaller than some county, so that we can still make the true statement "this district is smaller than a county").