Give an example of a true conditional statement in which the consequence is false. I am having trouble coming up with an example. Do I have to construct a sentence using truth tables ?
 A: If you understood what a conditional statement was, you wouldn't bother asking this question.
A: Yeah perhaps. dspyz. I guess I don't really understand. My answer to this question was: 
P: It is raining 
Q: It is cloudy
When P is false and Q is false then P => Q is true and the consequence Q is false. But I was told that my answer is wrong. 
A: Typically speaking, conditional statements in common English aren't useful unless they are quantified over something.  Consider the following example.
A man in California walks into a bar.  He goes up to the bartender and orders a drink.  The bartender first asks to see his ID.  The man provides his driver's license which shows that he was born in 1994. The bartender then serves him.  The man asks "Why did you need to see my ID first?" to which the bartender replies, "In California, the drinking age is 21.  If you are younger than 21, I can't legally serve you".
(yeah, I know.  Don't quit my dayjob)
The statement "If you are younger than 21, I can't legally serve you" is an example of a statement which in this case is true although its consequent is false.  The consequent here is "I can't legally serve you" which is false.  The bartender CAN legally serve the man, but the statement about legal drinking age still holds.
In this case, the statement in fact holds for all potential customers in this bar.  So one can generalize to "for any person who wishes to enter this bar, if they are younger than 21, the bartender cannot legally serve them" and the consequent may be true or false for different people to whom it is applied.
The vacuous case eg. "if the sky is yellow with pink polkadots, then gravity causes objects to repel rather than attract" is generally not useful, but still sometimes heard in common parlance as a fancy way to say "never".
For instance, "Wall Street bankers will use the proceeds of the economic recovery to create jobs when pigs fly".
Here the expression "X when pigs fly" can be interpreted as "X only if pigs fly" or rather, "If x, then pigs fly".  Since the consequent "pigs fly" is always false, it follows that "Wall street will use the proceeds of the economic recovery to create jobs" is also false.
