Question 22 is a weakening question. It's a really tough one.

It's so hard, in fact, that I'm willing to say that to get this question right,

you had to have spotted what was weak in the reasoning while you were reading the stimulus.

Okay, and if you didn't do that, I doubt process of elimination is going to help you.

In fact, even if you spotted the weakness in this reasoning,

there's still a good chance that the right answer choice would have eluded your notice,

because that's how subtle it was.

Okay, so that's how hard this question was.

Now let's read the stimulus.

on a treadmill, and then you have another group.

They watched recordings of other people running on treadmills.

So fine, we have two groups.

Group 1, Group 2.

Group 1 watched themselves running on treadmill, and Group 2 watched other people running on

treadmills.

And we contact them later.

Participants of first group reported exercising on average an hour longer each day than the

other participants.

Okay, so we contacted them later, and however much time you spent, however many minutes,

x minutes, you spent x plus 60 minutes exercising.

Now the conclusion says this shows that watching a video recording of yourself exercising,

which is what's different, right?

That's the toggling of the two groups, can motivate you to exercise more.

That's the conclusion.

These are the premises.

Now here's the crucial bit.

The conclusion is about whether you in fact exercised more.

Did we collect data on whether you in fact exercised more?

No, we didn't.

And that's the weakness in this argument.

What do we actually collect data on?

We collected data on how much you said you exercised, right?

This x minutes and x plus 60 minutes is what you said, right, what you said slash reported.

But what we care about is what actually happened, right?

So insofar as what you said happened tracks what actually happened, we say you're telling

the truth.

But insofar as what you said happened does not track reality, we call that lying.

And now do you see what assumption this argument is making?

It's making the assumption that what was reported tracks reality, right?

That when they said, oh, I exercised, you know, whatever it's x plus 60 minutes, that

what they in fact did was exercise x plus 60 minutes.

And, you know, when you said you exercise x minutes, what you in fact did was exercise

x minutes.

What if it's not, right?

What if like these people were telling the truth, but these people were lying?

You know, so that's the central weakness, the assumption, the central assumption this

argument makes is that this number here is a reliable indicator of this number here,

that what's reported is a reliable indicator of what's actual.

So if you saw that weakness, if you saw that assumption, that there's a chance that you

might have picked up on answer choice D, even though D is still very subtle, and we'll

get to that.

But to stay on the stimulus for just a little bit longer, this is really a terrible way

of collecting data that you care about.

Now, unless you actually, you know, unless the data you actually care about is what people

report they, you know, exercise, right?

Fine, then that's actually directly collecting data.

But if you actually care about how much they exercise, then this is a bad way to collect

the data.

You know, what's a better way?

Well, I mean, this is kind of creepy, but you could install cameras in their homes.

Creepy, yes, but also you would get accurate data.

You no longer have to call them and be like, hey, did you exercise today?

You know, how long did you exercise?

Right?

You could just watch the footage and you'll realize how much you can record data that

way.

So you just, you know, cut through this layer of potential bullshit, right, to get to the

actual data you care about.

Okay, so now that we've identified the central assumption this argument's making, I think

I can still hear an objection to answer choice D.

And it goes something like this.

Hold on a second.

Sure, it calls out this over-reporting issue, right, which highlights the fact that your

data collected may not accurately represent the data that you care about, right?

But that's not relevant because it's in a situation that's not similar to ours, right?

We're not talking about identical twins.

And surely you must not be assuming that identical twins can't tell each other apart, right?

They're watching their own twin reading.

Here you're watching yourself reading.

Like, you know that's yourself.

Here, surely the identical twin knows that they're not watching themselves.

You know, despite whatever issues we might have telling identical twins apart, they can

tell themselves apart, right?

Okay, fine.

So let's think about it this way then.

What if D were more general?

What if D just issued like a general warning about, you know, hey, look, in studies that

collect data through self-reporting, over-reporting is a big issue in those studies.

I mean, I hope you'd agree that that would absolutely weaken this argument because it's

calling out the central assumption and therefore central weakness in this argument, right?

Assuming that this is representative of this.

Okay, well then, how's D different from this answer choice, this general answer choice

that does in fact weaken question, the stimulus in 22?

Well, D is different in that it's not general.

It's specific.

It's saying, D is saying over-reporting, you know what?

Over-reporting is an issue in a situation like D, right?

Over-reporting is an issue in a situation like D.

And the challenge goes something like the situation in D is not similar enough to a

situation in our stimulus.

Yeah, but why?

Why is it not similar enough?

Like, I know it's not like exactly identical, right?

You know, we can make it better, you know, we can have a situation A, right?

Where situation A and over-reporting happens in situation A.

And you know what situation A is about?

Situation A was a study of running on an elliptical.

And we had two groups, you know, nobody were, we had no identical twins in those two groups,

right?

Just two different groups, people watching elliptical.

And that same thing, one group watched themselves, another group watched.

And then in that study, the group that watched themselves over-reported.

Okay, I'm sure there's absolutely no objection there.

I mean, that's just way too similar, right?

And you're thinking, okay, because A is very similar to the situation we talked about.

And if over-reporting is an issue in A, over-reporting is an issue in our situation,

right?

Fine.

So A is what?

A is a better answer choice than D, right?

Not this A, just, you know, situation A.

Okay, but the question stem didn't ask for the most ideal version of an answer choice,

right?

So surely the fact that you can improve upon D to make it more relevant to our stimulus

doesn't render D incorrect.

Do you see?

Yeah, there is some difference.

There's some distance between this idealized answer choice and what D is saying.

But just because D deviates from the ideal doesn't mean D is dissimilar.

Here's how D could be similar.

In this study, you're watching someone who physically looks like you.

Maybe that's what it is.

Maybe it's watching someone who physically looks like you because of course they're

identical twins, right?

So they physically look like each other.

Maybe it's watching someone who physically looks like you

that's getting you to over-report.

If that the case, then that's the same thing here.

You're watching someone who physically looks like you because of course, it's you,

or maybe it's not.

Maybe it's like it's someone it's watching someone who you can identify with doing the

the activity that leads you to over report on that activity.

In which case, it's the same thing here.

It's watching someone who you can identify with because of course you can.

It's you doing an activity which leads you to over report how much you do that activity.

You see, in those two instances, D is very similar to our stimulus.

And that's with the assumption that these twins are able to tell each other apart.

In other words, they're not fooled into thinking that they're watching themselves.

They are thinking that I'm watching someone who physically looks like me.

I'm watching someone who I can identify with.

Do you see?

Even with that assumption, D is still relevant.

Now that's not to say you can't make D better.

We already showed a situation where you can make D almost perfect.

You can make D just slightly better.

Let's say D prime.

Slightly better version of D where over reporting happens.

This D prime is where these twins, when they're watching their identical twin reading, they

actually were fooled by the way.

They were fooled.

They actually mistakenly thought they were watching themselves.

You see how that would make D a little bit better because now it gets a little bit closer

to our study.

So what?

Our job isn't, again, to make D the best version of itself.

Our job is just to identify an answer choice that weakens.

And D is the one that does it.

Introducing the spectrum, you might rightly think, wait a second, is there something you

could do to actually render it irrelevant?

Presumably the spectrum goes this way over towards perfection.

Also it goes this way towards awfulness, terribleness, complete irrelevance.

Sure, I think so.

I think there is some X situation that you can come up with where the fact that there's

over reporting in X truly is irrelevant because X is so much dissimilar.

There's nothing like our study such that the fact that over reporting happens in X,

yeah, what do I care?

Sure, I believe this range exists.

But the thing is, outside writers never really going to give us an answer choice that's even

close to ambiguity.

Somewhere in between, I'm sure there's this ambiguous zone which is not clear whether

it's relevant or not.

They're going to steer clear of that because that's not fair.

Just imagine, now instead of watching it, now you're watching your brother.

Now you're watching your father.

You really don't look alike.

Your father's a lot older than you.

Now you're watching your father figure.

Maybe this is your coach.

So you just keep piling on these little differences until you get to a situation where, man, it's

totally different.

Yeah, I grant, that could exist.

But that's nothing to do with this.

That's not D. D isn't even close to this.

So now let's talk about answer choice C, which is really tricky.

That's the subset of the participants that we're talking about.

They did not report exercising anymore before the study.

Before the study, they're like, I exercise 100 minutes a day.

After the study, they're like, I exercise 100 minutes a day.

Okay, great.

All right, now notice you really could have talked about anybody here.

These participants, presumably, some of them are old, some of them are in school, some

of them are working, some of them rent, some of them have cats.

You could have focused on any of those characteristics to get down to your subset.

Here they focused on who were already highly motivated to exercise.

So that's our subset.

Fine.

Okay, we want to talk about these.

We don't want to talk about the participants with cats.

We want to talk about the participants who are already highly motivated to exercise.

Fair enough.

How many of them were there in our study?

Yeah, we have no idea.

We know it's more than one, but that's it.

It could have been like three people.

And if it were three people, wow, who cares about them?

Right?

Like our study was with a thousand people and you have three people who meet this.

Yeah, we don't care.

We're talking about averages.

They would have gotten drowned out.

You know, I'm not saying that we know the study was with a thousand people.

What I'm saying is in order for C to do anything at all, we can strengthen just to be relevant,

just to have a seat at the table.

We have to assume that there are enough of these participants and you just can't do that.

Right?

So that's already a strike against C, enough to eliminate it.

Okay, but let's fix it.

Let's say, you know what, there are enough participants that meet this condition for

you to be relevant.

Fine.

Even then, it's still not good enough.

You don't know where these participants are.

Where are they?

Are they in this group that watch themselves or are they in this group that watch other

people?

We don't know.

Right?

Like there are three possibilities.

Either they were proportionally represented or they were disproportionately represented.

Right?

Proportional representation means, you know, however many you are, let's say there are

a hundred of you.

Right?

50s over here, roughly.

50s over here, 50s over here.

That's proportional representation across the two groups.

That's what would happen if you randomly distributed all your subjects into the two groups, which

is like what you should be doing, you know, if you want your study to be to control for

all other factors.

Right?

Okay.

So that's what happens if it's proportional.

If it's disproportional, you know, it'll be something like a hundred of you are over

here and zero of you are over here.

That would be disproportionately represented in group one versus a hundred of you over

here and zero of you over here.

So that's disproportionately represented in group two.

Right now.

Okay.

Of course it's a continuum, right?

It could be, you know, it doesn't have to be that crazy disproportionate, but broadly

speaking, that's what disproportional representation means.

Over representation in one or over representation in two or proportional representation.

Those are the three logical possibilities.

Right?

Now you have no idea which of the three is what's actually happening, but in order for

C to weaken, you have to assume two is what's happening, right?

You have to assume that you some, for some bizarre reason, shoved all of these participants

who are already highly motivated exercise into group two, such that they occupy like

this much of group two.

Because if you did that, now you understand why this number didn't move.

It didn't move because look, these people were already highly motivated exercise.

How are you going to motivate them more to exercise?

I mean, come on, it's not with like making them watch them or watch other people exercise,

right?

That feather of a motivation is not going to do it.

You might have to give them a ton of money, right?

Maybe that would do it.

So do you see this completely explains why this number didn't change.

So now the fact that this number changed, well, who cares?

Maybe you could have done anything.

You could have made them watch other people exercise.

Maybe that number would have changed, right?

Maybe you could have just, I don't know, made them play with dogs and maybe that would have

motivated them to exercise more.

Do you see?

That would weaken this argument, but that's such an unreasonable assumption.

Like how can you, because you know, you could just as arbitrarily assume that they would

all be over here or you could just arbitrarily assume that they were proportionally represented.

Do you see?

Like that's, by the way, that's compounded to the first mistake.

You know, even if they were disproportionately represented in two, if they were so few in

number, if they were just here, you see that it just doesn't matter, right?

Okay.

So all the reasons why C is wrong.

Now I want to say that you actually have good reason to think that they were proportionally

represented because the principle of charity compels us to assume this version, right?

The principle of charity, meaning you know that this is a study and the author didn't

say anything to make you think that they would be disproportionately represented.

So barring that information to be charitable to the author, to be charitable to the argument,

we have to assume that they did randomly distribute, right?

Imagine if you did not apply the principle of charity, how weird that would be.

You're like, okay, oh, author, you ran a study, huh?

You have one group.

Interesting.

And then you have another group.

Interesting.

Wait, tell me, author, why did you shove all the athletes into group one and shove all

the couch potatoes into group two?

Right?

The author would be like, what, what are you talking about?

I didn't do that.

Right?

I'm sorry.

I didn't take the time to specify that I did not specifically do this, right?

Just like how I did not specify that I also did not shove all the old people into group

one and all the young people into group two, right?

Because you know what?

Because I thought by telling you that I was running a study, you would have been charitable

enough to grant me the assumption that I actually knew what I was doing and I randomly distributed

my participants into these two groups, right?

So that's why the principle of charity operates, because you want to attack the strongest version

of the argument.

B says, another study's members exhibited an increased willingness to give to charity

B is like the opposite of D, right?

B actually strengthens the argument, because now we're dealing with a situation where

you hear a story about someone you identify with, here you watch video of someone you

identify with, and B is telling us it's not just they reported that they gave more to

charity, they in fact did so.

All right, so do you see how this is suggesting maybe over-reporting isn't happening?

Maybe they in fact did exercise more.

So it certainly isn't weakening the argument.

A says, in another study, people who watch recordings of themselves lifting weights,

running.

Oh, interesting.

Okay, but in both situations, they in fact exercised more.

So if A is doing anything, it's again strengthening the argument like B is.

on couches afterwards reported being sedentary for more time each day than the other participants.

So here's a third group, they watch themselves.

Now instead of exercising, they're not exercising.

They ended up reporting that they were sedentary for more time.

So it's still reported.

We don't know if this reported of being more sedentary means they actually were more sedentary.

Plus it seems to be in line, right?

Like what you're watching someone you identify with do an activity, and you end up reporting

doing more of that activity.

Just like how here you're watching someone you identify with do an activity, exercising,

and then you end up reporting doing more of that activity.

So it's like similar to the other data you already have.

I want to see how that will weaken this argument.

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.