LSAT 90 - Section 2 - Question 06

This is a Most Strongly Supported question.

The stimulus provides two different types of information. First, we’re given a correlation, which turns out to be useless. Second, we’re given a logical chain, which is what produces the inference.

The correlation is that darker honey tends to be higher in antioxidants than lighter honey.

The next piece of information, even though it's still in the same sentence, expresses a different relationship. It says that all of the most healthful strains of honey are unusually high in antioxidants. The keyword is “all” which the test writers conveniently hid in the middle of the sentence. If you catch that, you can translate this into an all statement using the conditional arrow. The set of “the most healthful strains of honey” is completely subsumed under the set of “honey that's unusually high in antioxidants”:

most healthful → unusually high in antioxidants

Finally, we learned that there are some strains of honey that come from sage nectar and are among the lightest in color, yet are also among the most healthful. This is a “some relationship,” an overlap in two sets. One of the sets is what we've already talked about: the set of the most healthful strains of honey. The other is the set of honey that comes from sage nectar and is lightest in color.

sage and among lightest ←s→ most healthful

We can chain together this “some statement” and the previous “all statement”:

sage and among lightest ←s→ most healthful → unusually high in antioxidants

This is a commonly repeating valid argument form A ←s→ B → C which produces the valid inference A ←s→ C. Translated back into English, some of the lightest strains of honey produced by bees harvesting sage nectar are unusually high in antioxidants. This is what Correct Answer Choice (A) says. Almost. (A) drops “lightest” but that’s fine. If it’s true that some of the lightest sage honey is X, then it’s also true that some sage honey is X.

Answer Choice (B) says most plants produce nectar that results in light-colored honey. This is unsupported. The information in the stimulus is consistent with most plants producing dark-colored honey or light-colored honey.

Answer Choice (C) says light-colored honey tends to be more healthful than dark honey. This is not supported (or actually, a bit anti-supported). All we know is that darker honey tends to be high in antioxidants. We also know that the most healthful honeys are all unusually high in antioxidants. This weakly suggests that it's the antioxidants that are causally responsible for the healthful effects. If we take that to be true, then (C) is actually anti-supported. But we don’t have to because this is just an MSS question and being unsupported is good enough to eliminate this answer.

Answer Choice (D) says certain strains of honey produced by bees harvesting primarily sage nectar are unusually low in antioxidants. This is unsupported. It’s a tempting answer because we know that sage nectar produces “among the lightest strains of honey” and we also know that there is a general correlation between honey being light and it having less antioxidants. But we also have enough information to infer that sage is an exception to the correlation, because we know that sage-produced light honey is among the most healthful strains of honey and we further know that the entire set of the most healthful strains of honey is subsumed under the set of honey that is unusually high in antioxidants.

Answer Choice (E) says the strain of honey that has the highest antioxidant content is a light-colored honey. This is unsupported. It could be true but it also could be false. We only have information in the stimulus about the set of honey that is among the lightest or among the most healthful or is unusually high in antioxidants. We have no information about the specific strains of honey at any of the extremes of those spectrums.