Question 1 is a Resolve Reconcile Explain question. We're asked to explain how newborn Dunnards manage to survive despite their thin skins.

Okay, so thin skins, what, is it somehow detrimental to survival?

Alright, so we're not clear yet. We have to read the stimulus to figure out just what it is we're asked to explain.

Oh, interesting, so for a few weeks after it's been born, Dunnard can't even breathe on its own.

So, but how does it breathe? I mean, it has to breathe somehow, right?

Instead, this tiny marsupial breathes through its thin skin.

Okay, so just directly through the skin it breathes, right, instead of how we breathe through our nose, mouths, and nose.

The Dunnard just kind of, like, uses its skin to breathe.

And this thin skin gradually thickens as the Dunnard matures inside its mother's pouch.

Oh, so it's like a kangaroo thing.

Marsupial mother's pouch.

The Dunnard is unique among warm-blooded mammals, the rest of which need thick skins throughout their lives to maintain body temperature and reduce water loss.

So finally, at the end of it, we get to the issue that we're trying to explain, which is, you know,

why is it that all the other warm-blooded mammals need to have this thick skin right away,

but the Dunnard somehow can get away with having thin skin for a while?

Well, what is it that the thick skin does? It maintains body temperature and reduces water loss.

So the issue, if there is one, is how the Dunnard is able to manage these things in spite of having thin skin.

So I think if you phrase the—if you frame the issue in that way, I think the answer choices are pretty straightforward.

You just—like, you know, it becomes cookie cutter, right?

There must be some other way for them to maintain their body temperature and reduce their water loss,

and mother's pouch seems to be suspicious, right? Like, maybe that's the—that's how they do it.

It's the mother's—it's mother's pouch keeps a newborn Dunnard warm and reduces water loss through its skin, right?

So that's how they're able to maintain their body temperature and reduce water loss despite having a thin skin.

Okay, so the others, you know, A says the Dunnard's respiratory muscle begin to develop a few days after birth.

Yeah, that really has nothing to do—I mean, you know, I'm still stuck with,

how come all the rest of the warm-blooded mammals need Thixin throughout their lives in order to do this and this,

yet you can somehow get away with a few weeks of having thin skin?

I mean, the fact that your respiratory muscles are developing has nothing to do with it.

Okay, that's fine, right? Like, I don't suppose all warm-blooded animals have exactly the same body temperature.

That'd be kind of weird. So the Dunnard's a little bit higher.

And I'm trying to figure out how they're able to maintain their body temperature.

You know, the fact that it's two degrees higher than many of the others.

Okay, maybe it's also five degrees lower than some others.

But, like, what does that matter, though, the Dunnard's body temperature relative to other warm-blooded mammals' body temperature?

The point is, how do you—whatever your body temperature is, how do you maintain it?

You know, the others maintain it through Thixin, and the Dunnard doesn't have Thixin for the first few weeks.

So in those first few weeks, how does the Dunnard maintain its body temperature?

And here B is just talking about, oh, but, you know, relative to this animal, the Dunnard has higher body temperature.

Relative to that one, it has lower. Yeah, who cares?

Yeah, okay, you know, again, like, now you're talking about adult Dunnards.

We're talking about the baby ones, right, the ones that have thin skin.

E says, some Dunnards live where daytime temperatures are high and climate—okay, that's nice.

I want to say E is baiting us somehow, but I'm not even sure how.

Right, because, I don't know, temperatures are high, I guess it's warm outside, you don't need to maintain your body temperature.

And the climate is dry. Maybe if it said the climate and the climate is wet, right, so maybe water loss becomes less of an issue.

Even then, we still have to assume that the temperature being high means that you don't have to maintain your body temperature.

Who knows if that's true? Maybe it's too high.

Maybe you actually need to protect your body temperature from being—from overheating.

And the climate being wet, does that actually help to reduce water loss? I don't really know.

Plus, on top of that, it's just some Dunnards, right, so E is pretty awful.

You're watching my fresh attempt at PrepTest 81, Section 2, Logical Reasoning.

Question 1 is a Resolve-Reconcile-Explain question, and I read the stimulus, it was

to maintain its body temperature, water loss, so the mother's pouch seemed like a pretty

good candidate for that other way, so when I encountered Answer Choice D, I chose it

and moved on fairly quickly, 30 seconds.

Question 2 is a Fill-in-the-Blank-Miscellaneous question.

The stimulus talks about stand-up comedians, talks about humor, and then, up until the

last sentence, it talks about that, and then we jump abruptly to professors, so this is

an argument by analogy.

You have to analogize the relevant bits, so here, B seemed to do that.

So that was 40 seconds for Question 2.

Question 3 is a Sufficient-Assumption question.

It's very short, and it's very cookie-cutter, a bridge between the premise and the conclusion,

and I found it in the stimulus, and now I'm just hunting for it in the Answer Choices D.

It was the correct one.

That was 20 seconds.

So far, all three questions have been very cookie-cutter, and Question 4 is a Weakening

question.

This one, I'm reading the stimulus, and I'm trying to figure out what the issue, what

the assumption might be, and I realize it's, my pencil's hovering on the Presented to him,

and I'm like, okay, well, he's paying the bill to present it to him, I mean, what about

the ones that weren't presented to him?

Did he know of them, or did he not know of them?

So B offered that, so I picked it.

I have 35 seconds.

Question 5 is a Necessary-Assumption question.

I'm reading this relatively short stimulus, and the first time I read it, it didn't make

sense as an argument to me.

I didn't understand how the first sentence could cast doubt on the commonly held view,

so I went back and read it again.

As I'm reading it again, I'm thinking about it.

How can it cast doubt?

So then I realize the only way it could cast doubt is if they're assuming that humans were

already in Europe.

So then I found the answer twice, it was pretty quick, 35 seconds.

Question 6 is a PSA question.

Here, it's a longer question, you can just see there are more words than in question

5.

It's pretty straightforward.

You have to identify the conclusion, which is, that would be a mistake.

Why is it a mistake?

Because of the last sentence.

So true to PSA form, the right answer choice just tells you if premise, then conclusion.

So A has a conclusion bit correct, but the premise bit, the sufficient condition doesn't

really trigger with our premise.

B is just a much more straightforward way of stating it.

It triggers very clearly.

So then I spent about 10 seconds reading C, D, and E. Altogether, 55 seconds on question

6.

Question 7 is the most strongly supportive question.

For some reason, I had a hard time connecting with the meaning of the sentences.

So I'm already reading the first sentence twice, now I'm reading it a third time.

And then I think I finally get it, like, different non-human primate species.

So they talk about orangutans, they talk about chimpanzees.

Now once I felt like I had the information from the stimulus, and so this is the second

time through the stimulus, I'm reading a stimulus twice, just really to make sure I understand

what's going on.

Once I had that information in my mind, I was able to process the answers pretty quick,

and C just stood out as a pretty standard cookie-cutter answer choice for MSS.

It's just a restatement of something.

They said orangutan is pretending to ignore, so that's deception.

Question 8 is a flaw question.

Question 7 was 45 seconds, question 8 is 40 seconds.

Flaw question, also very standard flaw, part-whole issue.

So I went down into the answer choices, and I misfired on C here, I circled it, but then

I finished reading.

I circled it before I even finished reading it, because the first half of C sounded good,

so I thought, you know, then of course I finished reading it, I was like, oh, C's not right.

And then I read D and realized that D is actually the right one.

question 3.

There seems to be a sufficient condition for her not revealing his identity, and then there's

also a sufficient condition for her revealing his identity.

So we need to, and then the conclusion is that, oh, she's going to reveal his identity,

so then you want to trigger that sufficient condition, but you don't get to.

All you get is that something about concerning violations of the power plan, so okay, well,

you just need to make sure that thing, right, you need to make sure that thing triggers

the sufficient condition that will get her to reveal the identity, which is the thing

about the judge.

All right, so here we have a cookie cutter sufficient assumption question where the bridge

is between two premises, all right, so something that I spent a little more time in the stimulus

because I wanted to nail that down before moving into the answer.

So altogether it was 50 seconds.

Now question 10 is a miscellaneous PSA question.

You have the conditional statement above, and then you're trying to apply the conditional

statement below, and they just give you a bunch of sufficient conditions to trigger.

You know, first you have to have borrowed something.

I mean, if you didn't borrow anything, forget it, you're out of this game, right?

You have to have borrowed something, and you have to have promised to return it by a date,

and it would not be difficult for you to do it, and the person who lent the item to you

did not give you permission to return the item late.

So if all four of those things trigger, then you have to return it on that date, and you

should return it.

So you're just looking for a story that matches that, you know, it's just a lot of words.

So by the time I got to answer choice E, and they put it as the last answer choice, you

know, by the time I got to answer choice E and decided that was right, it was about 60

seconds had passed.

Question 11 is a necessary assumption question.

This one took 55 seconds, and I don't think there's anything very special about this.

They tell us that, okay, there are two gases, and then they say, but it's weird that, you

know, neither of the two gases attract more than just the bare human arm, which suggests

that there's something else about the bare human arm that's attractive to mosquitoes.

And then they just rather arbitrarily eliminate visual cues as one potential categorically

different type of cue, right, we're talking about gashes.

And then you eliminate that, but it opens the door to other categorically different

types of visual, sorry, different types of cues.

For example, heat cues, you know, and they don't talk about that, they just jump straight

to, okay, it must be some other kind of gas.

So that's how I figured out B was a necessary assumption.

And question 12 is a resolve-reconcile question.

This was 55 seconds also.

And this one, you know, I'm just spending time in the stimulus, you probably have noticed

I like to do that because I think it's the right thing to do.

You want to make sure you understand the stimulus before moving into the minefield that is answer

choices.

So once I understood what was going on here in the stimulus, answer choice A just popped

right out.

Yeah, I mean, like, if it's a top layer, it's obviously applied later, which doesn't really

tell us anything about when the original layer was applied, the original layer being the

painting itself.

Question 13 is a strengthening question, standard cookie-cutter stimulus correlation causation

phenomenon hypothesis.

And the answer was a standard cookie-cutter as well of when the hypothesis, that is to

say, that really it was the public heeding the campaign, meaning they did wash their

hands.

Now, if that were true, you'd expect other phenomenon that hand-washing would decrease

to in fact decrease.

And that's exactly what answer choice A gives us.

In other words, the hypothesis makes a prediction about the real world and an answer choice

that empirically validates that prediction is set to strengthen the hypothesis.

So that should have been quick, but I got caught in BCD and E as you see me just kind

of slowly right now working through BCD and E.

But they really mess with you because some of them are actually weakening answer choices.

So that explains the slowness, but ultimately I got through all the answers and chose A,

and that was 60 seconds.

Question 14 is a main point question, 40 seconds for that.

As I was reading through the stimulus, I identified the main point, but I did not identify all

the details of the main point, which then now you see me looking through the answers.

I liked A, I liked C. I don't like D, don't like E. So now I'm between A and C, and I

was going to pick, or rather I thought A was better, but I knew that there was, you know,

the difference between A and C is A says in general, C says only if.

So then I just went back to the stimulus and confirmed, and I saw the word needs, which

corresponds to only if.

So then I switched it from A to C. So that was 40 seconds.

Question 15, most strongly supported question, 50 seconds for this one.

This one is one that I, even at the end of it, I was not very certain about my answer,

but I was gambling.

You know, I was saying like, okay, I put my probability at maybe 87%, but that's good

enough because I should move on.

It's only question 15.

I still got a bunch of other questions.

I think if I had to give myself advice, I would say for a question like this, put a

light circle around it.

I knew I wasn't that certain.

I mean, it's, okay, it's cookie cutter, right?

You put together the first sentence and the idea that dietary needs vary widely, and then

of course you get to answer choice D. But leaving question 15, I was not very certain

about it, so I should have put a circle around that.

Here you'll see me read the stimulus once, and when I get to the end of it, I don't go

into the answers because I don't understand what the stimulus is talking about.

So what I decided to do was think about it and read the stimulus again.

That is every time the right decision.

All the answer choices are going to do is further compound your confusion and waste

your time.

So you want to go into the answer choices with as little confusion as possible.

In other words, as much clarity as possible.

So that was good.

The second time reading it, taking that additional time to think about it, I understood the argument

very clearly and anticipated fairly precisely answer choice A. So as soon as I saw answer

choice A, I was like, yes, that's the one I was thinking about.

So I chose to move on.

45 seconds.

Question 17 is most strongly supported question.

I read the first sentence a couple of times just because I was like, what are you talking

like?

Really?

People try to figure out how audience members in 1920s felt about films.

That just was a strange concept to me.

So it took some time.

I had to read the first sentence a couple of times for that to stick.

But once that stuck, the rest of the stimulus flowed pretty well from there.

Even so, I still thought C was attractive.

But I also thought D was attractive.

So that's good.

You know, I say you have to make two mistakes to miss a question.

You have to misfire and choose a false.

You got to commit a false positive error and you have to commit a false negative error.

So while I did commit a false positive error in thinking C was good, I avoided the false

negative error by not eliminating D by also thinking D was good.

So that clued me in on the fact that there's something seriously wrong with question 17.

So I circled it and I moved on.

Absolutely right decision.

60 seconds.

And we'll see a return to this question in round two.

Now question 18, I knew question 18 was going to be a time sink because argument part questions

tend to contain some of the most convoluted argument structures you'll see on LSAT on

the logical reasoning section.

And on top of that, this is about astrophysics, a subject that I'm curious about but know

very little about.

So I was prepared to spend time on this.

Ultimately, before I move on, I'll have spent 110 seconds on this question, which is nearly

two minutes.

Normally, I would say that's, hey, that's way too much time for round one, right?

But if you look at the clock, it's reading, what, just 14 minutes and on question 18 already.

So I realized, actually, I can do this.

You know, I can actually do this.

And the other component that went into my decision making was upon reading the stimulus,

I didn't feel like this was too crazy.

I actually felt like I got a good handle on it.

So I read answer choice A. I thought A sounded about right, but, you know, I definitely wanted

to eliminate the rest of them because I knew this was hard.

So I did eliminate the rest of them.

And then still I wasn't sure.

Still I wanted to, now what I'm doing is reading the stimulus once again in order to confirm

answer choice A. So that's a lot of layers of security piled on there.

And I'm purchasing each of those layers with additional time, you know.

But that's a decision.

I wasn't, like, lost in this.

Often, you know, you'll see from previous prep tests, commentary videos, I'm like, oh,

I was so lost I shouldn't move on.

I actually think I made the right decision here even though I spent 110 seconds.

Question 19 is the most strongly supported question.

Having read the stimulus, I realized, okay, so a new gas power, natural gas power, you

need four things.

And we're not going to be able to have all four of those things.

So I thought, I anticipated the right answer would be, well, we just can't build any new

natural gas power electrical generation stations.

But I didn't find that answer choice among the answer choices.

See what the LSAT writers did here is something they often do, which is they tweak up the

difficulty.

They amp it up in the answer choices.

The stimulus makes it sound like stimulus lends itself to very easy answer choice.

But the answer choice itself, answer choice C, does in fact say you can't build new ones.

But it says it in a different way.

It says it in a subtle way.

That's how they hide answer choice C. Whereas answer choice A baits you to make an erroneous

assumption that if you can't build new ones, well, future electrical needs must be met

by some other means like nuclear.

That's not true.

The existing ones could get turned up.

The existing natural gas power could get turned up to generate more electricity.

So that's the error I made in choosing answer choice A. But I think there's a meta-level

error, which is that I knew I wasn't certain about this question.

I had spent 85 seconds when I moved on.

That's the second slowest question up to question 19.

This is the second slowest one.

I knew I wasn't sure.

I was probably like 83% sure about this question.

So just like question 15, question 19 is a question I also should have circled.

So I made two errors there, a meta-level error of confidence, overconfidence, and a primary

level error of just making an erroneous assumption about answer choice A and also not recognizing

the subtlety.

Now, question 20, I'm already second time through the stimulus.

First time I read the stimulus, looked through the answers, didn't see it.

And then I read the stimulus again.

And now I see it.

A is answer choice.

A is the flaw.

So here, it was kind of similar to question 19.

When I had read the stimulus, I anticipated what the error might be.

It's just doesn't mean that generation, you just wait.

Wait for the current generation to turn 60, or 65, and they'll start voting more too.

But I wasn't sure how they were going to say it in the answers.

And A found a very subtle way to say it.

And E was the trap answer choice, I felt.

E was the one that was trying to get you to pick it.

But that one only took 55 seconds.

Now question 21 took 100 seconds.

So that's 1 minute and 40 seconds.

And I read the stimulus, and then you saw me do a little pencil thing about 10 or 20

seconds ago.

That was to visualize what was going on.

So there's this crucial element here, and we don't really know what this crucial element,

if it has any downsides, so we should hold off before we continue.

So that was the generalized version.

Now I think what was happening was I was, again, all three of these questions, 19, 20,

and 21, made me anticipate something, the right answer choice.

But then the correct answer choice kind of, in some way, didn't match what I was anticipating.

And that's a characteristic feature of hard questions.

So here, answer choice B, the reason why I didn't latch on to B the first time I read

it is because B is actually a very coarse-grained match, coarse-grained analogy.

It doesn't capture all the elements, but it captures some of the elements, and it captures

the crucial elements, the key elements.

And it just ignores a bunch of the other elements that the stimulus has.

So I was looking for something a little more closely matched, and B wasn't that.

So that's why I overlooked it.

But then, you know, you go through it again, and you realize all the others are really terrible.

Question 22 is a weakening question.

I spent 80 seconds on this question.

I circled C, and then I put a circle on question 22, and I moved on.

So we'll come back to this on round two.

I'm recording...

It hasn't been that much time since I took this prep test, and as I'm recording this

live commentary, I wanted to do it relatively close to when I took it so that I could kind

of recall what I was thinking.

And I'll tell you that at this moment, I still don't know why D is right and C is wrong.

Or at least I don't know it well enough to explain it.

So hopefully by the time I get to make the video of this, I'll have figured that out.

So I think I'll just limit my commentary to this kind of higher-level, my strategy approach.

So unlike question 17, there were two misfirings, false positive for answer choice C and a false

negative for answer choice D. I had a chance to save myself here by avoiding the false

negative error, but because I was so overconfident in answer choice C, I thought just D is whatever.

That overconfidence led me to dismiss D erroneously.

So two errors coincided in getting this question wrong, but I circled this, and we will return

to it in round two.

Question 23 is a necessary assumption question, and I spent 80 seconds also on this one.

Here I'm reading the stimulus, and it wasn't clear to me what the argument was.

It almost sounded circular.

So now I'm at the end of the first reading of the stimulus.

I'm thinking about this, and I'm like, okay, necessary assumption, I have to read this

again because I didn't feel like I had a clear understanding of what's going on.

So reading it again, I thought I understood this better, and A made sense.

I recall reading A and trying to negate answer choice A and realized, oh, if you negate answer

choice A, this argument just kind of falls apart.

So I chose it, and I'm checking the others.

Don't like any of the others, and moved on.

Question 24 is a parallel flaw method reasoning question.

This one, I felt like the stimulus was decently straightforward.

There are only two possible views.

We don't have a good account of one of those views, therefore the other view.

So reading the stimulus, I finished reading the stimulus, I'm just mapping out the general

form of it.

You got the two dots representing two views, not the first dot, therefore the second dot.

So that was just to reinforce the form that I was looking for.

And then I'm moving through the answers.

I moved through A very quickly because it just completely didn't match.

So now I'm like, B doesn't look good, C, I like C, it's primarily economic or political,

but we don't have economic, therefore it's political, so I just pick it.

D doesn't really match, E doesn't really match, so 65 seconds on that one.

Question 25 is a flaw question.

You'll see me read the first sentence three times, I think, because sometimes you switch

gears so quick, and then just like, what are you talking about?

So you have to just read it and understand it.

If it takes more than one reading, you got to just read it more than once, but you have

to understand what it's talking about.

So once I got past the first sentence, the rest of it flowed pretty well, and I realized

what was the issue.

It's the oldest mistake in the book, sufficiency necessity error.

Then once I identified that, just hunting through the answer choices to find the right

one, and it's D. So that one took only 40 seconds.

Question 26 is an agreement question.

So I don't like to do the read Winston and then eliminate some of the answers, and then

re-Sanjay, and then, you know, that's like a good approach for A-B passages.

It's not like a bad approach for these agreement disagreement questions.

What it is is a slower approach.

If you can just hold all this information in your mind and just approach the answer

choices that way, it's faster.

So that's why I prefer that method.

Now, for answer choice C, I'm starting to go back.

I'm like, wait a second, I haven't even read D and E yet, right?

I don't know if you saw that.

You don't want to just go back to the stimulus before having read all the others, because

you could have an easy answer choices as E was a pretty straightforward answer choice.

So as soon as I saw E, I was like, okay, well, I don't like C anymore because E is so strongly

supported.

75 seconds on this question.

And I figure out, I pick up this point, I figure out C is not right, because box office

success could depend on a film's being funny or frightening or moving, yet still be totally

unhelpful to historians, because historians presumably care about whether the audience

found it funny or frightening.

I mean, it's just like, if funny and frightening both collapse into a successful film, while

all you have is a successful film, you don't know why it was successful, did the audience

find it funny or did they find it frightening?

And that's what film historians care about.

So C was no good for that reason.

And I realized D is fairly straightforward, actually.

It's just, they said in the first sentence, historians find it difficult to determine

typical audience member response, and then they said, well, newspapers fail to provide

insight.

Okay, you take those two statements, you push it together, that very strongly supports D,

which is very cookie cutter for MSS questions.

So here, I was just taking a step back and making sure that D was the right answer.

Question 21, on round two, I spent nearly two additional minutes on it, 105 seconds,

I believe.

And the reason why I spent a lot of time is because B was still bugging me.

It just didn't match as well as I wanted it to match.

You know, I already mentioned this in round one, that B was a coarse-grained analogy.

It's just too loose.

But it doesn't change the fact that the others are even worse.

They're way worse.

A, C, D, and E are just terrible.

And it's not like the first time in a parallel method of reasoning question where the right

answer choice is not an ideal answer choice.

It's just the right answer choice.

Of course you can make it better.

The fact that it can be improved upon doesn't mean that its current version is wrong.

So now if you look at the question stem, you actually realize it's not a standard parallel

method of reasoning question stem.

It says the principle underlying the argument is most similar as the principle underlying.

So I think the way they phrase that question stem actually gives them that freedom to craft

answer choice B so that B is further apart from the stimulus than what I was hoping for.

My failure to pay attention to that stimulus, I think, is what cost me all this extra time.

I think if I paid more attention to the stimulus, I'm like, oh yeah, it's just that the principles

need to be similar.

If the principles are similar, then the actual argument could actually be considerably different.

So had I realized that, I think I could have saved myself some time because I wouldn't

have felt as uncomfortable with B.

Now question 22, round 2, I spent about 70 seconds on this, but it was a complete waste

because I was still overconfident.

You can see there's a light circle on question 22, which means that I kind of didn't want

to come back to this.

But I knew I didn't quite understand what was going on.

I was trying to convince myself that I did.

C was the answer choice I chose because it was this use of statistics.

I've been exposed, obviously, to a lot of LR questions, so I felt like C is the kind

of answer choice that would match the kind of stimulus they gave me.

That's not the worst way to think about it.

There's certainly way worse ways to think about LR questions, but it's also not the

best way.

Here's a better way to think about it.

How about you just consider the specific premise and the specific conclusion and the specific

reason why this argument works or doesn't work.

That's a much better way to think about it.

But that method takes more intellectual work.

Being overconfident makes you lazy, too, so I just didn't want to do it.

So now I go back and I'm looking at question 10 and I look at question 12 for God knows

what reason.

But I think the general takeaway from this whole section is overconfidence.

I should have circled question 19 and I knew that.

I should have circled question 15 and I knew that, so I could have used this additional

time on questions 19 and 15, so maybe I could have picked up an additional point there.

So the key takeaway is not to be overconfident.

Seems like a pretty simple and obvious lesson to learn.

But here hopefully you saw just specifically what that looks like.

Now it's not true that I was overconfident in every single question.

That's false.

I had the right amount of confidence on most of these questions.

But for a small subset of these questions, I was overconfident.

So that's something to dial back.

So if I were in the middle of my prepping and this was the result, I would tell myself

for the next prep test, like when you know you're in trouble, you should just circle

the question.

I mean, it's not like I have a ton of questions circled anyway.

So it's not like I run the risk of overpopulating my circles.

Okay, so that's it.

This video is about to end.

And you can see it's like, what a shame, I still have like more than five minutes on

this section, yet there were two points on the table that I didn't pick up.