LSAT 114 – Section 2 – Question 12

LSAT 114 - Section 2 - Question 12

October 2002

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Question
QuickView		 Type Tags Answer
Choices		 Curve Question
Difficulty		 Psg/Game/S
Difficulty		 Explanation
PT114 S2 Q12
+LR
+Exp
Except +Exc
Weaken +Weak
Sampling +Smpl
A
2%
159
B
3%
160
C
73%
167
D
10%
160
E
12%
161
141
153
165
 +Harder 145.502 +SubsectionMedium

Several recent studies establish that most people would want to be informed if they had any serious medical condition. In each study, over 80 percent of the people surveyed indicated that they would want to be told.

Summarize Argument
The author concludes that most people would want to be informed if they had any serious medical condition. As support, the author says that in each of several recent studies, over 80% of those surveyed said that they would want to be informed if they had a serious medical condition.

Notable Assumptions
The author assumes that these studies surveyed a group that was representative enough to make broad, generalized conclusions that apply to “most people.” The author also assumes that the sample sizes for these surveys was high enough to make conclusions that apply to “most people.” Additionally, the author assumes that the survey design was high quality for each survey, and that the questions were not phrased in a way that could bias the results.

A
In another recent study, most of the people surveyed indicated that they would not want to be told if they had a serious medical condition.
(A) weakens the argument because it introduces survey data that contradicts our author’s conclusion. We have no information about how any of these surveys were conducted, or how many studies support our argument, so a survey with contradictory information weakens the argument.
B
People often do not indicate their true feelings when responding to surveys.
(B) weakens the argument because it provides a reason to doubt survey data as legitimate evidence to make the kind of claim that the author is making.
C
Some of the researchers conducting the studies had no background in medicine.
If someone has no background in medicine, it does not mean that they would be unable to conduct a quality survey. Also, we only know that “some” of the researchers had no background in medicine, which only tells us that this applies to at least one researcher.
D
Some questions asked in the studies suggested that reasonable people would want to be told if they had a serious medical condition.
This weakens the argument because it says that at least some of the survey questions were phrased in a way that would bias the results, which gives reason to doubt the validity of these surveys.
E
The people surveyed in the studies were all young students in introductory psychology courses.
(E) tells us that the surveys were not conducted on a representative sample. This weakens the argument because it makes it far less likely that the results of the survey can be generalized to make a conclusion about “most people.”

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LSAT PrepTest 114 Explanations

Section 1 - Logical Reasoning

Section 2 - Logical Reasoning

Section 3 - Reading Comprehension

Section 4 - Logical Reasoning

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