How do I stop second-guessing myself? I chose A immediately after reading the stimulus, but then I overanalyzed every answer choice and wasted a ton of time. I still ended up picking A, but a question that should’ve taken under a minute ended up taking 2:39. So frustrating.
I feel like I got to the fact that B is incorrect because the stimulus doesn't tell us anything about the state of what the ocean was like before phosphorous doubled. Is that correct? It seemed like J.Y.'s explanation contradicted my reasoning.
@cwferrari You are correct. B has two reasons why it is incorrect. The main reason you listed and J.Y's comment. Nowhere in the stim does it mention most.
I don't know if it's good to do this, but for POE I tell myself "can we know this from the info provided" and if it's not, I eliminate it. It's been working and I'm meeting the time on most (or fairly close).
A) Yes - the stimulus states and follows this
B) No - fish might have not have been able to survive prior regardless - we don't know
C) No - bacteria could be on the ocean floor because of some source other than agricultural runoff - we don't know
D) No - we don't know how much runoff poured out to double the phosphorous - could be .5x, 2x, 3x, 4x, 5x - we don't know
E) No - we know bacteria eating plankton consumes oxygen - we have no idea from the stimulus if that could be a general rule happening elsewhere
I'm treating the stimulus as the entirety of the information we need and if an answer choice mentions something not in the stimulus, it's out.
@colincy And if the correct answer choice wants you to infer something that is not in the stimulus, you compare with all the answer choices that are from the stimulus?
i'm having a hard time going from growth of plankton to decaying of plankton. i saw it as a contrapositive, so i was trying to map it out oppositely. any help?
I got it right! "A" seemed obvious to me this time. I know that won't always be the case. I chose it because it directly referenced the runoff pollution from rivers and the plankton growth at the ocean's surface. I drew the causal chain before I looked at the answers, and it definitely helped. My area of concern is how do I know what to look at from the causal chain?
Quick question — In E, it says "inversely proportional." Should we interpret this to mean simply that "if one goes up, the other goes down"? For example, what if oxygen changes cause phosphorus to change exponentially? Mathematically, that wouldn’t be considered an inversely proportional
@jess.zzz — JY addresses this in the video. That said, you’re correct. The opposite is directly proportional, which means that two things travel in the same direction — one thing goes up (or down) and so does the other.
Writing B out to make sure I fully understand, because even with the comparative claim, I feel I wouldve still put it as wrong:
"Before phosphorus levels doubled in the ocean region, most fish were able to survive in that region."
'Most fish' is wrong because, its trying to tell us a number. What if only a few more fish survive, but the area is still not a great place for fish to survive?
'More fish' is not trying to give us a number, but it would break the chain we have set up for conditional logic.
"Before phosphorus level doubled" = Before we had this conditional chain that lead to few fish surviving.
If we break the chain, or the chain had not yet existed, we can safely say more fish would have survived, because the phosphorus was not yet effecting their habitability.
having 'More' instead of 'Most' would have made that chain correct. Not more correct than A, because this is an MBT question, but if A wasn't there, B with the word 'More' would have been the correct answer.
This is all super thorough and definitely helps check the logic and reasoning, but I wanted to flag that I also eliminated B just because the stimulus doesn't tell us anything about a time "before" the phosphorus levels doubled.
The stimulus only tells us about the period now, following the past few decades during which the phosphorus levels have doubled -- not before this period of phosphorus growth. As such, we have no information from the stimulus regarding a time before this phenomenon occurred. Thus, a claim about such a period, including that "most fish were able to survive" cannot be supported and is rendered more as an assumption. We can't know this for sure. Maybe there was a pack of killer hungry sharks in the waters during the pre-phosphorus era in this ocean region that was eating all the fish, still meaning most fish couldn't survive.
I agree that if the word "most" was changed to "more", as you suggest, B could be closer to being true, but even then, we still don't have any info from the stimulus about the fish population and their survival rates in the pre-phosphorus period, including if even more survived during that period. To demonstrate, the killer shark population could have eaten enough fish during the pre-phosphorous period to balance out the loss of fish in the post-phosphorous era.
Essentially, since the stimulus never speaks about the time before the phosphorous levels increased, we cannot anticipate or know what other variables could have affected the fish population then, and thus, any claims (in the Answer options) about their survival rates and population size during a prior time cannot be validly supported, instead serving more as assumptions.
BUT, all this being said, I think the logic you have used, which maps the different answer choices on the spectrum of validity, would have been really well applied if this was a MSS question! Thank you for mapping it like that because I struggle most with MSS Qs!
#help I don't get JY's explanation for why B is wrong. i feel like B: "Before phosphorus levels doubled in the ocean region, most fish were able to survive in that region." would be wrong even if it said 'more' fish instead of 'most' fish.
Because we simply can't make any inferences about before phosphorus levels doubled. The contrapositive of the conditional chain would be / few fish survive --> / oxygen loss --> /bacteria buffet --> /decaying plankton (floor) --> growth plankton (surface ) -->/2x Phos --> /Agricultural RO
So we still don't know what happens when 'before phosphorous levels doubled'. I guess the only thing we could say is that there would be no agricultural run off because if there's no 2x phos, then there's no agricultural run off, but we definitely can't say that before phosphorous levels doubled, more fish would be able to survive. Maybe there was never any fish to begin because a fish-eating bacteria killed them all.
So isn't jy wrong when he says this:
"What’s true of that time? If we follow our chain of consequences, we can say for certain that before the phosphorus doubled, less plankton growth, less decaying plankton, less bacteria buffet, less oxygen loss, and ultimately more fish survived vs. the present."
"Before phosphorus levels doubled in the ocean region, most fish were able to survive in that region." this answer would be wrong since there are so many other factors that could contribute to the fish not surviving, it is simple to broad of a claim and not backed up enough by the passage. and the passage also never talked about fish survival/population before the phosphorus so it would be too wide of an implication to pick this. i hope that makes sense
I think you mixed up condition vs. causation. Conditional logic is a formal logic so there is a contrapositive because you stimulate "must happen" rule, but causal logic is informal, I don't think contrapositive applies here.
It's because we do know for sure that before phosphorus levels doubled, the fish that would have died due to phosphorus levels wouldn't have died due to phosphorus level, meaning more of them would still be there, which is why "more" could be maybe true, but "most" is a much bigger assumption.
Speaking from a more "lawgic-oriented" perspective, I said that C is wrong because it confuses necessity for sufficiency (oldest mistake in the book as he always says) - based on the stimulus we can only that if there is no bacteria eating plankton that guarantees that there is no agricultural runoff (contrapositive of what is said in stimulus: /agricultural runoff → /bacteria) but not having agricultural runoff does not ensure that there will not be any bacteria to devour plankton
Wouldn't B also be wrong because we have no way of knowing from the stimulus what occurred before the past few decades? Like there could have been some even greater ecological issue?
I'm asking because that's the reason I eliminated it, and now I want to make sure I didn't do the right thing for the wrong reasons :)
I get all the drill questions right but when the time comes to do a practice test, I end up falling short of my goals by a lot. I think it's because these drills are one at a time and the tests are 25 or so at once and I get fatigued.
Best way I have found is to just do increasingly more questions in a single sitting. I'm just now getting to the point to where I can take a section without getting too tired.
I think E is also wrong because the stimulus doesn't tell us how much/the amount of oxygen in the body of water discussed in the ocean was left after phosphorous doubled. There is no numerical figure referring to the amount oxygen in the water. From what I read online, "inversely proportional," more specifically means two things that move in opposite directions each by the same amount. So we can't infer that oxygen is depleted to levels 2X less than it was before after phosphorous doubled. ~
That was my thinking as well - we can say that one increases the other decreases because that's what the stimulus states but we cannot say anything about the entire amount of Oxygen left in a body of water because they never talked about it
Nah, think about it: the stimulus says A (Agricultural Runoff) → B (Phosphorus Doubling) → C (Plankton), and the inference Answer A is making is A → C directly (the chaining rules if you recall) therefore, it still is an inference and not directly stated. I hope that helps you :)
Subscribe to unlock everything that 7Sage has to offer.
Hold on there, stranger! You need a free account for that.
We love that you want to get going. Just create a free account below—it only takes a minute—and then you can continue!
Hold on there, stranger! You need a free account for that.
We love that you came here to read all the amazing posts from our 300,000+ members. They all have accounts too! Just create a free account below—it only takes a minute—and then you’re free to discuss anything!
Hold on there, stranger! You need a free account for that.
We love that you want to give us feedback! Just create a free account below—it only takes a minute—and then you’re free to vote on this!
Hold on there, you need to slow down.
We love that you want post in our discussion forum! Just come back in a bit to post again!
Subscribers can learn all the LSAT secrets.
Happens all the time: now that you've had a taste of the lessons, you just can't stop -- and you don't have to! Click the button.
97 comments
I think I finally understand what answer choices to avoid. Got it right and under the time limit!
How do I stop second-guessing myself? I chose A immediately after reading the stimulus, but then I overanalyzed every answer choice and wasted a ton of time. I still ended up picking A, but a question that should’ve taken under a minute ended up taking 2:39. So frustrating.
Bamboozled by E squad
Is it safe to say that you can't draw a conditional conclusion from a causal relationship?
@NyahStewart Yes (assuming the causal statement doesn't say something like "X always causes...")
A one-time event or series of events doesn't prove that something is inevitable or guaranteed.
I feel like I got to the fact that B is incorrect because the stimulus doesn't tell us anything about the state of what the ocean was like before phosphorous doubled. Is that correct? It seemed like J.Y.'s explanation contradicted my reasoning.
@cwferrari You are correct. B has two reasons why it is incorrect. The main reason you listed and J.Y's comment. Nowhere in the stim does it mention most.
@amhuynh It doesn't mention most but it does mention few, and you can assume most is the opposite of few.
This was an easy one for my #realenvironmentalsciencegeezers #environmentallaw #unemployablewithoutaJD
@CeciliaBurton1 lol its why I'm going into environmental law
I don't know if it's good to do this, but for POE I tell myself "can we know this from the info provided" and if it's not, I eliminate it. It's been working and I'm meeting the time on most (or fairly close).
A) Yes - the stimulus states and follows this
B) No - fish might have not have been able to survive prior regardless - we don't know
C) No - bacteria could be on the ocean floor because of some source other than agricultural runoff - we don't know
D) No - we don't know how much runoff poured out to double the phosphorous - could be .5x, 2x, 3x, 4x, 5x - we don't know
E) No - we know bacteria eating plankton consumes oxygen - we have no idea from the stimulus if that could be a general rule happening elsewhere
I'm treating the stimulus as the entirety of the information we need and if an answer choice mentions something not in the stimulus, it's out.
@colincy And if the correct answer choice wants you to infer something that is not in the stimulus, you compare with all the answer choices that are from the stimulus?
@colincy this is the way I eliminate answers as well. I eliminated B quickly because you can't necessarily assume that based on the stim
i'm having a hard time going from growth of plankton to decaying of plankton. i saw it as a contrapositive, so i was trying to map it out oppositely. any help?
@msfro It was not a conditional logic stimulus. It was an informal one. No contrapositives.
Does anyone else get it where their computer glitches and it doesn't allow them to scroll up or choose an AC?
Anyone else having a hard time mapping this out mentally? I notice I get the right answers, but I'm still 20 seconds over target time.
I got it right! "A" seemed obvious to me this time. I know that won't always be the case. I chose it because it directly referenced the runoff pollution from rivers and the plankton growth at the ocean's surface. I drew the causal chain before I looked at the answers, and it definitely helped. My area of concern is how do I know what to look at from the causal chain?
Quick question — In E, it says "inversely proportional." Should we interpret this to mean simply that "if one goes up, the other goes down"? For example, what if oxygen changes cause phosphorus to change exponentially? Mathematically, that wouldn’t be considered an inversely proportional
@jess.zzz — JY addresses this in the video. That said, you’re correct. The opposite is directly proportional, which means that two things travel in the same direction — one thing goes up (or down) and so does the other.
maybe this is a dumb question, but- is there anyway to BR these questions? still figuring out this new site.
@moonydidit Yes i'm having the same issues where I cannot blind review on the new site.
@AnibalCPerez It seems to be fixed now
Writing B out to make sure I fully understand, because even with the comparative claim, I feel I wouldve still put it as wrong:
"Before phosphorus levels doubled in the ocean region, most fish were able to survive in that region."
'Most fish' is wrong because, its trying to tell us a number. What if only a few more fish survive, but the area is still not a great place for fish to survive?
'More fish' is not trying to give us a number, but it would break the chain we have set up for conditional logic.
"Before phosphorus level doubled" = Before we had this conditional chain that lead to few fish surviving.
If we break the chain, or the chain had not yet existed, we can safely say more fish would have survived, because the phosphorus was not yet effecting their habitability.
having 'More' instead of 'Most' would have made that chain correct. Not more correct than A, because this is an MBT question, but if A wasn't there, B with the word 'More' would have been the correct answer.
This is all super thorough and definitely helps check the logic and reasoning, but I wanted to flag that I also eliminated B just because the stimulus doesn't tell us anything about a time "before" the phosphorus levels doubled.
The stimulus only tells us about the period now, following the past few decades during which the phosphorus levels have doubled -- not before this period of phosphorus growth. As such, we have no information from the stimulus regarding a time before this phenomenon occurred. Thus, a claim about such a period, including that "most fish were able to survive" cannot be supported and is rendered more as an assumption. We can't know this for sure. Maybe there was a pack of killer hungry sharks in the waters during the pre-phosphorus era in this ocean region that was eating all the fish, still meaning most fish couldn't survive.
I agree that if the word "most" was changed to "more", as you suggest, B could be closer to being true, but even then, we still don't have any info from the stimulus about the fish population and their survival rates in the pre-phosphorus period, including if even more survived during that period. To demonstrate, the killer shark population could have eaten enough fish during the pre-phosphorous period to balance out the loss of fish in the post-phosphorous era.
Essentially, since the stimulus never speaks about the time before the phosphorous levels increased, we cannot anticipate or know what other variables could have affected the fish population then, and thus, any claims (in the Answer options) about their survival rates and population size during a prior time cannot be validly supported, instead serving more as assumptions.
BUT, all this being said, I think the logic you have used, which maps the different answer choices on the spectrum of validity, would have been really well applied if this was a MSS question! Thank you for mapping it like that because I struggle most with MSS Qs!
@elw2147 Exactly what I was going to say!
"alas, all things that live must one day die."
JY with his inner Shakespeare.
"Big fish, small fish"... red fish blue fish.
JY with his inner Dr Seuss.
A man of many letters indeed.
@aldertree00644 The duality of man...
#help I don't get JY's explanation for why B is wrong. i feel like B: "Before phosphorus levels doubled in the ocean region, most fish were able to survive in that region." would be wrong even if it said 'more' fish instead of 'most' fish.
Because we simply can't make any inferences about before phosphorus levels doubled. The contrapositive of the conditional chain would be / few fish survive --> / oxygen loss --> /bacteria buffet --> /decaying plankton (floor) --> growth plankton (surface ) -->/2x Phos --> /Agricultural RO
So we still don't know what happens when 'before phosphorous levels doubled'. I guess the only thing we could say is that there would be no agricultural run off because if there's no 2x phos, then there's no agricultural run off, but we definitely can't say that before phosphorous levels doubled, more fish would be able to survive. Maybe there was never any fish to begin because a fish-eating bacteria killed them all.
So isn't jy wrong when he says this:
"What’s true of that time? If we follow our chain of consequences, we can say for certain that before the phosphorus doubled, less plankton growth, less decaying plankton, less bacteria buffet, less oxygen loss, and ultimately more fish survived vs. the present."
"Before phosphorus levels doubled in the ocean region, most fish were able to survive in that region." this answer would be wrong since there are so many other factors that could contribute to the fish not surviving, it is simple to broad of a claim and not backed up enough by the passage. and the passage also never talked about fish survival/population before the phosphorus so it would be too wide of an implication to pick this. i hope that makes sense
I think you mixed up condition vs. causation. Conditional logic is a formal logic so there is a contrapositive because you stimulate "must happen" rule, but causal logic is informal, I don't think contrapositive applies here.
It's because we do know for sure that before phosphorus levels doubled, the fish that would have died due to phosphorus levels wouldn't have died due to phosphorus level, meaning more of them would still be there, which is why "more" could be maybe true, but "most" is a much bigger assumption.
Speaking from a more "lawgic-oriented" perspective, I said that C is wrong because it confuses necessity for sufficiency (oldest mistake in the book as he always says) - based on the stimulus we can only that if there is no bacteria eating plankton that guarantees that there is no agricultural runoff (contrapositive of what is said in stimulus: /agricultural runoff → /bacteria) but not having agricultural runoff does not ensure that there will not be any bacteria to devour plankton
i am finally getting must be true feels so good!
This is a funny question to me bc I wrote a paper on this exact topic and came up with the same conclusion LOL. Felt like I cheated on this question
Wouldn't B also be wrong because we have no way of knowing from the stimulus what occurred before the past few decades? Like there could have been some even greater ecological issue?
I'm asking because that's the reason I eliminated it, and now I want to make sure I didn't do the right thing for the wrong reasons :)
I concur. I eliminated it right away when it started talking about a different time period that wasn't mentioned in the stimulus.
same. We don't know what happened before.
I get all the drill questions right but when the time comes to do a practice test, I end up falling short of my goals by a lot. I think it's because these drills are one at a time and the tests are 25 or so at once and I get fatigued.
Same
Best way I have found is to just do increasingly more questions in a single sitting. I'm just now getting to the point to where I can take a section without getting too tired.
I got this right by rejecting the implication that growth of plankton had anything to do with decaying plankton. Like I had:
AgRun--> 2xPL--> growth at surface
SEPARATE from the long chain:
decaying plankton--> floor--> bacteria eat--> consumes oxygen --> depletion --> fish die
Is this wrong to do?
I think E is also wrong because the stimulus doesn't tell us how much/the amount of oxygen in the body of water discussed in the ocean was left after phosphorous doubled. There is no numerical figure referring to the amount oxygen in the water. From what I read online, "inversely proportional," more specifically means two things that move in opposite directions each by the same amount. So we can't infer that oxygen is depleted to levels 2X less than it was before after phosphorous doubled. ~
That was my thinking as well - we can say that one increases the other decreases because that's what the stimulus states but we cannot say anything about the entire amount of Oxygen left in a body of water because they never talked about it
NO.
The question asks for an INFERENCE.
Answer A is literally stated in the stimulus., and is therefore NOT AN INFERENCE, and is therefore WRONG.
Nah, think about it: the stimulus says A (Agricultural Runoff) → B (Phosphorus Doubling) → C (Plankton), and the inference Answer A is making is A → C directly (the chaining rules if you recall) therefore, it still is an inference and not directly stated. I hope that helps you :)
Finally getting the trick of this :)