Note to a lot of people who are having trouble with the question. The most important part of the question stem is "most weakens". Everything other than choice B, are either irrelevant or does nothing. B does something, barely, but it is something to weaken the argument, viz. pointing out potential dissimilarities in the analogy. Which is all to say, the choice that weakens "the most", not necessarily is a one-hitter quitter, is the right one no matter how uncomfortable it feels to choose it. If all of the other choices blow, and there is one you don't like, but is relevant, that's the answer (probably).
I think B is very poorly supported, there is simply not enough information to know whether that is relevant. E is supposedly disqualified since there is a presumed difference between "first few" and "several" but the assumption needed to consider first few and several as equivalent is MUCH smaller than the assumption that a difference in relative size is harmful to the argument. I strongly disagree with this one.
I think I can help provide some guidance for anyone who got stuck between A and B like I did and went with A:
The reason that A is not the answer is that although the option of "requiring costly repairs" seems alluring in the weakening of the economic development, you are weakening the analogy used by the columnist and then have to infer that the columnist's city may also require costly repair. However, option B more directly criticizes the support between the premise of "Other cities have earned large returns on such an investment." and the conclusion that this city also investing in this adviser by bringing the scope out to say "well ok but you're comparing the economic development of New York and Boston to the economic development of Bangor Maine"
So, while both A and B are weakening the supports of the premises, B does so much more directly so that you don't need to infer that because some cars do still break down despite receiving preventative maintenance, this city's economy will also incur major costs despite the economic adviser.
So the reason it's not A and is instead B, is becasue A does not widen the gap between Motorists and the city council. Instead it provides facts about A, but dosen't compare that to B so we can't use it?
@HilarySackor It doesn't weaken the analogy. It somewhat weakens the argument. The prompt doesn't ask us to weaken the analogy - just the argument.
'Other cities [with much larger economies and populations] experienced large returns, so can we reliably conclude that our city is also likely to experience a big payoff?' Maybe less so, because answer B is what tells us that our city has small pop & econ.
(but even then, it's not a very good 'weakening' argument imho..)
@HilarySackor It does weaken the analogy. It is listing properties of the columnists city that are different from the other cities used at the end of the argument to analogize. When you have an analogy, the more different the two things being compared are, the weaker it is as a logical argument.
Let's say you want to know what happens if you open a brand new restaurant in NYC. Imagine I explain to you exactly what happened when I opened a restaurant in say Charleston SC, that it was extremely successful, and gave that as a reason to open the same kind of restaurant. Well my analogy is weak because Charleston has significant differences, it is smaller, a completely different culture, presumably different people with different food presences, different tax codes etc...
So that is what the original argument is doing. It's basically saying that "these other cities that you compared our city to is too different in respect to size and economy." By elucidating that difference, it has made the analogy worse.
Confused as to why C is irrelevant. I thought it would be the right answer given it says it is for non-financial reasons and they just hired a financial advisor. So regardless of what they do, it won't affect auto maintenance given that it is not done for nonfinancial reasons rather than because of finances, so how would the financial advisor help? This question really confused me. I didn't fully understand the stimulus.
I was thrown off by this question. I skipped past B, bc I thought, in terms of LSAT logic, "smaller" doesn't quite cut it. We don't know how this one difference impacts the columnist's claim, if at all. Therefore, I thought E was the answer, bc it provides something that directly answers to the stimulus (or, at least, one part of it), which is that the investment "is likely to have a big payoff in several years." I thought E weakens this statement bc it says that those other cities didn't see any returns in the first few years, and I equated several and few, so I took E to be the most powerful answer in weakening the columnist's claim.
Are there situations where the analogy is there and doesn't necessarily contribute to the conclusion, but an answer choice referencing, or talking about it is the correct choice?
I'm quibbling with this question. In order for B to be correct, it seems as if we have to assume that the size of the population and economy is meaningfully linked to the returns on the city's investment in an advisor. This assumption isn't present in any form in the stimulus.
I still think this is the correct answer choice, as the others are less relevant to the stimulus, but B could also as easily be irrelevant, if we ultimately find out the population and size of the economy are irrelevant to the return on investment.
@EliK I think the point is that this is an argument by analogy. The argument says "this strategy worked for other cities so it should work for us too". You're right that the stimulus doesn't say that the size of the economy and population are important to investment returns BUT the strength of an analogous argument depends on the degree of similarity between the entities you're comparing. B) says "The columnist's city has a much smaller population and economy than the other cities did when they began devoting resources to economic development planning." This highlights a significant difference between the cities and weakens our ability to draw an analogous conclusion on the expected outcome of investment.
@EliK I agree that it relies on an assumption, but that assumption is not unreasonable. I also agree with what @AudreyGilmour said. It weakens the argument as it was given in the stimmy. They are using other cities as an example of long-term development paying off. Highlighting dissimilarities between the cities being compared weakens the argument.
For the columnist's argument to remain strong, she would have to explain why the other cities are relevant examples to draw from, which is not a part of their original argument. The other answers don't have to be addressed by the columnist at all for her argument to remain strong, because they're totally irrelevant to the OG argument. Answer choice B may be relevant or irrelevant after we have more information, but it still attacks a core pillar of the argument and needs to be addressed. If you have to add more information to your argument for it to remain strong based on a point someone made, their point is most likely weakening your argument.
It's always imperative to remember the difference between "most weakens" and "must be false."
I got it right but I disregarded the answers involving the car analogy as I identified that as context and thus irrelevant to the argument's structure. Did anyone else think this way?
I understand why all the other options are wrong, but I am still not fully convinced I understand why B is right. Could anyone try explaining it in a different way? #feedback
I approached B by thinking about the relativity of a premise to its conclusion. It seemed to me that B almost entirely invalidated one of the strongest premises by showing that it was inapplicable, and knowing that most of the time its only one answer choice that will do that, I chose it. Truly, I don't think its the best way, but it worked for me.
Now I can see it as well. Sometimes the answer won't be directly correlated as much as other questions lead us to assume, but it is the only somewhat close option. The others are so off the mark, I guess we are left with B. So many little tricks on the LSAT that I can't keep up. Thanks for your reply!
So is it a fair thing to say that if we have multiple premises, and one of them is much stronger than the other, it is almost always better to weaken the stronger premise? Like in this one, the similarities between a car and a city are huge and comparison's between a city and another city will naturally be smaller. Therefore, arguments from analogy between cars and cities can never be as strong as an argument from analogy between city and city. So inherently, the second premise is stronger and if we weaken that one we will weaken the argument more?
How this would play into the test would be this strategy: if we can identify the strongest premise in the argument (it just has to be strongest in the argument, doesn't have to be a strong or airtight argument) then we should weight our answers towards those that attack the stronger premise?
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88 comments
had to 2x this video...
Note to a lot of people who are having trouble with the question. The most important part of the question stem is "most weakens". Everything other than choice B, are either irrelevant or does nothing. B does something, barely, but it is something to weaken the argument, viz. pointing out potential dissimilarities in the analogy. Which is all to say, the choice that weakens "the most", not necessarily is a one-hitter quitter, is the right one no matter how uncomfortable it feels to choose it. If all of the other choices blow, and there is one you don't like, but is relevant, that's the answer (probably).
I think B is very poorly supported, there is simply not enough information to know whether that is relevant. E is supposedly disqualified since there is a presumed difference between "first few" and "several" but the assumption needed to consider first few and several as equivalent is MUCH smaller than the assumption that a difference in relative size is harmful to the argument. I strongly disagree with this one.
This whole premise and answer choices, including the correct answer choice, are really weak....Not a fan of this question or explanation
wait highkey why is this explanation 16 mins long, i feel like i can't retain any of it
Why not just give us the whole stimulus? It was way harder to identify which sentences were premises and conclusion this way.
@MelanieGonzalez you can see the entire question and answers at the top of the screen where it says "show question" :)
@MelanieGonzalez I draw conclusions as I read, and then he presents a brand new part of the question. It is so frustrating!
I think I can help provide some guidance for anyone who got stuck between A and B like I did and went with A:
The reason that A is not the answer is that although the option of "requiring costly repairs" seems alluring in the weakening of the economic development, you are weakening the analogy used by the columnist and then have to infer that the columnist's city may also require costly repair. However, option B more directly criticizes the support between the premise of "Other cities have earned large returns on such an investment." and the conclusion that this city also investing in this adviser by bringing the scope out to say "well ok but you're comparing the economic development of New York and Boston to the economic development of Bangor Maine"
So, while both A and B are weakening the supports of the premises, B does so much more directly so that you don't need to infer that because some cars do still break down despite receiving preventative maintenance, this city's economy will also incur major costs despite the economic adviser.
@JosefLangevin Well done with this explanation. Thank you
gonna pretend i understood any of this for my own sanity
This question hurts my whole body
Am I the only one that thought all of these answers sucked? 😂
So the reason it's not A and is instead B, is becasue A does not widen the gap between Motorists and the city council. Instead it provides facts about A, but dosen't compare that to B so we can't use it?
what the hell is this stimulus
Can someone simplify B and how it weakens the analogy
@HilarySackor It doesn't weaken the analogy. It somewhat weakens the argument. The prompt doesn't ask us to weaken the analogy - just the argument.
'Other cities [with much larger economies and populations] experienced large returns, so can we reliably conclude that our city is also likely to experience a big payoff?' Maybe less so, because answer B is what tells us that our city has small pop & econ.
(but even then, it's not a very good 'weakening' argument imho..)
@HilarySackor It does weaken the analogy. It is listing properties of the columnists city that are different from the other cities used at the end of the argument to analogize. When you have an analogy, the more different the two things being compared are, the weaker it is as a logical argument.
Let's say you want to know what happens if you open a brand new restaurant in NYC. Imagine I explain to you exactly what happened when I opened a restaurant in say Charleston SC, that it was extremely successful, and gave that as a reason to open the same kind of restaurant. Well my analogy is weak because Charleston has significant differences, it is smaller, a completely different culture, presumably different people with different food presences, different tax codes etc...
So that is what the original argument is doing. It's basically saying that "these other cities that you compared our city to is too different in respect to size and economy." By elucidating that difference, it has made the analogy worse.
Confused as to why C is irrelevant. I thought it would be the right answer given it says it is for non-financial reasons and they just hired a financial advisor. So regardless of what they do, it won't affect auto maintenance given that it is not done for nonfinancial reasons rather than because of finances, so how would the financial advisor help? This question really confused me. I didn't fully understand the stimulus.
I was thrown off by this question. I skipped past B, bc I thought, in terms of LSAT logic, "smaller" doesn't quite cut it. We don't know how this one difference impacts the columnist's claim, if at all. Therefore, I thought E was the answer, bc it provides something that directly answers to the stimulus (or, at least, one part of it), which is that the investment "is likely to have a big payoff in several years." I thought E weakens this statement bc it says that those other cities didn't see any returns in the first few years, and I equated several and few, so I took E to be the most powerful answer in weakening the columnist's claim.
does anyone know how to see the question in its entirety before watching the video?
@b_farmer12 scroll up and press "show question" (with the eye icon)
@MayaSutton-Hall Thank you!
Not really a fan of how he broke up the question throughout the video without us being able to see it
Are there situations where the analogy is there and doesn't necessarily contribute to the conclusion, but an answer choice referencing, or talking about it is the correct choice?
I cannot believe I got this correct
population has literally NOTHING to do with this.
surely that means their payoff could be even bigger.
I'm quibbling with this question. In order for B to be correct, it seems as if we have to assume that the size of the population and economy is meaningfully linked to the returns on the city's investment in an advisor. This assumption isn't present in any form in the stimulus.
I still think this is the correct answer choice, as the others are less relevant to the stimulus, but B could also as easily be irrelevant, if we ultimately find out the population and size of the economy are irrelevant to the return on investment.
@EliK I think the point is that this is an argument by analogy. The argument says "this strategy worked for other cities so it should work for us too". You're right that the stimulus doesn't say that the size of the economy and population are important to investment returns BUT the strength of an analogous argument depends on the degree of similarity between the entities you're comparing. B) says "The columnist's city has a much smaller population and economy than the other cities did when they began devoting resources to economic development planning." This highlights a significant difference between the cities and weakens our ability to draw an analogous conclusion on the expected outcome of investment.
@EliK I agree that it relies on an assumption, but that assumption is not unreasonable. I also agree with what @AudreyGilmour said. It weakens the argument as it was given in the stimmy. They are using other cities as an example of long-term development paying off. Highlighting dissimilarities between the cities being compared weakens the argument.
For the columnist's argument to remain strong, she would have to explain why the other cities are relevant examples to draw from, which is not a part of their original argument. The other answers don't have to be addressed by the columnist at all for her argument to remain strong, because they're totally irrelevant to the OG argument. Answer choice B may be relevant or irrelevant after we have more information, but it still attacks a core pillar of the argument and needs to be addressed. If you have to add more information to your argument for it to remain strong based on a point someone made, their point is most likely weakening your argument.
It's always imperative to remember the difference between "most weakens" and "must be false."
How can we tell the difficultly level of this question?
I got it right but I disregarded the answers involving the car analogy as I identified that as context and thus irrelevant to the argument's structure. Did anyone else think this way?
I understand why all the other options are wrong, but I am still not fully convinced I understand why B is right. Could anyone try explaining it in a different way? #feedback
I approached B by thinking about the relativity of a premise to its conclusion. It seemed to me that B almost entirely invalidated one of the strongest premises by showing that it was inapplicable, and knowing that most of the time its only one answer choice that will do that, I chose it. Truly, I don't think its the best way, but it worked for me.
Now I can see it as well. Sometimes the answer won't be directly correlated as much as other questions lead us to assume, but it is the only somewhat close option. The others are so off the mark, I guess we are left with B. So many little tricks on the LSAT that I can't keep up. Thanks for your reply!
So is it a fair thing to say that if we have multiple premises, and one of them is much stronger than the other, it is almost always better to weaken the stronger premise? Like in this one, the similarities between a car and a city are huge and comparison's between a city and another city will naturally be smaller. Therefore, arguments from analogy between cars and cities can never be as strong as an argument from analogy between city and city. So inherently, the second premise is stronger and if we weaken that one we will weaken the argument more?
How this would play into the test would be this strategy: if we can identify the strongest premise in the argument (it just has to be strongest in the argument, doesn't have to be a strong or airtight argument) then we should weight our answers towards those that attack the stronger premise?