AC A, if true, could be reasonably used as a premise to support the conclusion: LHB limited to earth and moon.
AC D, if true, could be reasonably used to attack the premise used by the author to support the conclusion: /LHB limited to earth and moon.
Regardless of the fact that attacking a premise is not the same thing as weakening a conclusion, AC A is actively involved in supporting the conclusion that the question asks us to strengthen, whereas AC D is not. Tricky question!
I watched both explanations and dug through these chats (wish we could search) but cannot get an explanation that gives me the confidence on why A is correct. I understand the line of thinking being explained, but what doesn't make sense is why we are so sure there was an increase at all?
Hypo 2 suggests a continuous decreasing bombardment, but I don't see how it suggests an increase.
It says the latter part was so intense that it obliterated evidence of earlier impacts, but all that suggests is that even at the tail end and lowest part of this bombardment, it was still intense enough to destroy evidence of past hits. Does a hit have to be more intense than another to destroy its evidence? I don't understand why we are so sure that the passage dictates there was an increase which would then make A make sense.
I understood A to imply there was no increase in intensity, which is irrelevant as I didn't think there needed to be an increase or decrease in intensity for the bombardment to have hit Mars. Perhaps Mars was hit heavily consistently for all those years? Perhaps it was a slow decline in intensity, but still was hit nonetheless?
What am I missing here? I'm sure it's obvious since nobody else seemed to have the same confusion. Thanks in advance!
@bbcream I think you are focusing too much on disproving hypothesis 2. The point of the question is to strengthen the view that LHB was limited to Earth and the Moon. If LHB occurred 4 billion years ago and it was limited to the earth and the moon then we would not see evidence of LHB on any other planets. Answer choice A is simply stating that there is very little (essentially zero) evidence LHB happened on mars (which strengthens the view that it was limited to the earth and moon by eliminating an alternate explanation). The "declining" bombardment mentioned in hypothesis 2 is irrelevant because the question isn't asking us to weaken hypothesis 2, it is asking us to strengthen hypothesis 3.
the easiest way to eliminate D is that that particular rock being from the Moon instead of Mars doesn't necessarily mean that the LHB was only confined to the Earth-Moon system. It is already described as being rare to have that kind of sample and doesn't say that the only way the rock got to Earth was through the LHB. Even if the rock was re-classified to have come from the Moon, that still doesn't mean the rock came from the result of the LHB, and there is still a chance that the LHB impacted other internal solar system bodies. Essentially, the rock actually being from the Moon doesn't preclude the LHB from impacting other bodies.
D, in comparison, shows quite strong proof of similar "test subject" experiencing different results. Mars is a similar size, relatively close to Earth, has moons etc. D is obviously not a perfect answer, but it is a lot stronger answer.
Both the video (Kevin Lin’s explanation) and the “lightbulb” analysis are flawed. They commit the same error that makes this question difficult, but post hoc, so it’s hard to see. They both substantially elevate A, which contains an extraordinarily weak piece of evidence for the LHB being limited to the Earth-Moon system. A and D are both about very weak pieces of evidence. The key to this high difficulty question is learning how to balance weak evidence. Pedagogically, don’t let this question train you out of your instincts about weak evidence. If you hate drawing a conclusion from the evidence in A, you have good instincts! Now lets discuss why the evidence here is weak. First, the “seems Martian” meteorite. The meteorite is hedged (“seems,” “if indeed”), and (here I agree with Lin), is about a single impact. The crater evidence, while based on many observations, comes from only one planet and uses a technique the passage itself highlights as hard to interpret and potentially overwritten. By itself, A doesn't allow any conclusion to the rest of the inner solar system (Venus, Mercury, etc.), so it is an extraordinarily weak basis for “limited to Earth–Moon.”
Still, getting rid of the “seems Martian” rock (D) does support T3. (A) also supports T3, weakly. The relevant thing is the interaction. Spotting that interaction is the difficult skill this question rewards. (A) doesn't just weakly suggest that there was not an LHB-like intensity increase on Mars, it also undercuts the meteorite data because it acts upstream of the meteorite in the causal chain where LHB impact leads to (debris and crater) leads to Martian debris meteorite impacting on Earth. The key is recognizing that A does two weak things at once, not pretending A is strong or generalizable to the entire inner solar system. If the crater survey had been elsewhere, say Venus, D would be the answer. It's only because without evidence of LHB-like impacts on Mars we're forced to further reduce the likelihood that the meteroite in the passage is actually from Mars, that (A) comes out on top.
@dh2303 What I'm seeing is an alternate take on why A is stronger than D. But I don't quite see how this shows the theory put forth in the video explanation is wrong. Can you elaborate on why you think the video explanation is wrong?
I'm using the following framework:
(1) If the LHB extended to the inner solar system, then we'd expect to see increased intensity of bombardment throughout the entire inner solar system (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Moon, Mars).
(2) (A) provides evidence that we don't see increased intensity where we'd expect to see it.
(3) (D) does not, because the LHB-inner-solar-system theory doesn't lead to an expectation that the specific rock should have come from outside the Earth-Moon system.
I gather from your comment that if (A) had been about Venus, it'd be wrong, that you disagree with step (1) in the analysis above.
@Kevin_Lin Yes, you've identified a key part of the disagreement. My understanding is the scope overlap between A and D is required for A to be the best answer. This comes textually from the explicit weakening of crater surveys as a source of evidence in P2 and the limitation of the evidence to an extensive survey of one poorly generalizable location. If the stem had asked for what MSS the view that the LHB did not involve Mars, then the balance changes. But it doesn't. We are not evaluating the weakening of a hypothesis that the LHB covered the whole inner solar system. We are evaluating strenghtening of a hypothesis that the LHB was limited to the Earth and the Moon. Given that, I think you need logical coverage of the rock data with the scope of the crater survey for A to clearly be correct. Not to wax pedagogical, but in my answer journal, I've decided to call this the scientist trap, as a certain high scoring profile is tempted to limit understanding of the evidence to the 'figure' that may have produced it, and is wary of using logical coverage to assess the balance. It's a hueristic that happens in a flash for someone with hard scientist training, and it's appropriately penalized here. To be clear, the reasoning move I objected to in your explanation isn't the scientist trap. They're just parallel in that they independently strengthen one type of evidence for the wrong reason. The structural coverage of A's scope over D's scope drives the choice
this was just wayyy over my head no matter how hard I try to gage my brain into thinking about a subject I am less than comfortable with, cause in law that is what we are going to have to do, but for the purposes of LSAT and timing, this would have been an automatic skip. In a real-world setting I think I would have like to dedicate more time to this specific subject matter if it were a case.
@wifi-router it is, and that is one of the reasons D is tempting. But the question is about the relative strength of A and D. A is stronger than D, despite not being air-tight.
him saying that this is one of the most tempting traps in RC makes me feel better about choosing D but this questions still makes me want to cry 😭😭😭 level 6 ass question
This type of question is really important to capture flaws in our reasoning. I see that in the comments there is debate about A being right because it fails to clearly communicate how the lack of intensity of projectiles striking Mars during the LHB period would show no support for hypothesis 2.
But I do think A can be seen as ruling out and failing to support hypothesis 2. This is because the time period mentioned allows us to make the inference that we would see an increase in intensity of projectiles striking Mars during the period '3-4' billion year period, while seeing a decline in the '4-5' billion year period. However, if as A says there is a lack of evidence for the increase in intensity during the 3-5 billion years, either before or after the conclusion as hypothesis 2 would suggest, then hypothesis 2 is not supported at least for one inner solar system planet—Mars.
When the question states there was no evidence of "increasing intensity" my mind goes to the possibility that it was already intense - hence supporting the outside the moon/earth system - and that an increase from a large amount of intensity to a crazy amount of intensity is not saying the same thing as there was no evidence found on Mars for the intensity of bombardment associated with the LHB. I got rid of this choice based on the ambiguity of increased intensity. How could have I approached this better without discounting this concept in other questions where it is important to recognize
@BaconCubed I approached this with a POE lens. None of the other ACs definitively rule out the possibility of the LHB affecting Mars, they just reaffirm that it did affect Earth and the moon. We already know that the moon and Earth experienced the LHB, but right now Mars is just speculation. However, no matter how intense the existing projectile intensity was on Mars before the LHB, the assumption is that it would have increased even more as the bombardment increased, but if there's n evidence of this we have no reason to believe that the Mars rock that was found wasn't just a rare occurrence but part of the LHB.
They also ratcheted up the difficulty by having A say "during the period three billion to five billion years ago" instead of "during the late heavy bombardment." Basically adding in another logical move for you to make: recognizing that the LHB occurred 4 billion years ago.
@nickiqueenofrap i go to another tab where I have the classic 7sage website pulled up to see the curve. This question was wild. 59% guessed AC: D and 30% guessed AC: A. AC: A 162 scorer has a 25% chance of getting this right, and a 180 scorer has a 50 percent chance. Hard question.
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87 comments
wait what the hell
love the science ones, makes me engineer brain happy
@AthleticWonderfulWhile I am a scientist too but LSAT is tricky regardless
War crime tier question
Here is how I am thinking about this.
AC A, if true, could be reasonably used as a premise to support the conclusion: LHB limited to earth and moon.
AC D, if true, could be reasonably used to attack the premise used by the author to support the conclusion: /LHB limited to earth and moon.
Regardless of the fact that attacking a premise is not the same thing as weakening a conclusion, AC A is actively involved in supporting the conclusion that the question asks us to strengthen, whereas AC D is not. Tricky question!
this one was evilll
@KevinLin'sOldUserName pls help...
I watched both explanations and dug through these chats (wish we could search) but cannot get an explanation that gives me the confidence on why A is correct. I understand the line of thinking being explained, but what doesn't make sense is why we are so sure there was an increase at all?
Hypo 2 suggests a continuous decreasing bombardment, but I don't see how it suggests an increase.
It says the latter part was so intense that it obliterated evidence of earlier impacts, but all that suggests is that even at the tail end and lowest part of this bombardment, it was still intense enough to destroy evidence of past hits. Does a hit have to be more intense than another to destroy its evidence? I don't understand why we are so sure that the passage dictates there was an increase which would then make A make sense.
I understood A to imply there was no increase in intensity, which is irrelevant as I didn't think there needed to be an increase or decrease in intensity for the bombardment to have hit Mars. Perhaps Mars was hit heavily consistently for all those years? Perhaps it was a slow decline in intensity, but still was hit nonetheless?
What am I missing here? I'm sure it's obvious since nobody else seemed to have the same confusion. Thanks in advance!
@bbcream I think you are focusing too much on disproving hypothesis 2. The point of the question is to strengthen the view that LHB was limited to Earth and the Moon. If LHB occurred 4 billion years ago and it was limited to the earth and the moon then we would not see evidence of LHB on any other planets. Answer choice A is simply stating that there is very little (essentially zero) evidence LHB happened on mars (which strengthens the view that it was limited to the earth and moon by eliminating an alternate explanation). The "declining" bombardment mentioned in hypothesis 2 is irrelevant because the question isn't asking us to weaken hypothesis 2, it is asking us to strengthen hypothesis 3.
the easiest way to eliminate D is that that particular rock being from the Moon instead of Mars doesn't necessarily mean that the LHB was only confined to the Earth-Moon system. It is already described as being rare to have that kind of sample and doesn't say that the only way the rock got to Earth was through the LHB. Even if the rock was re-classified to have come from the Moon, that still doesn't mean the rock came from the result of the LHB, and there is still a chance that the LHB impacted other internal solar system bodies. Essentially, the rock actually being from the Moon doesn't preclude the LHB from impacting other bodies.
D, in comparison, shows quite strong proof of similar "test subject" experiencing different results. Mars is a similar size, relatively close to Earth, has moons etc. D is obviously not a perfect answer, but it is a lot stronger answer.
Both the video (Kevin Lin’s explanation) and the “lightbulb” analysis are flawed. They commit the same error that makes this question difficult, but post hoc, so it’s hard to see. They both substantially elevate A, which contains an extraordinarily weak piece of evidence for the LHB being limited to the Earth-Moon system. A and D are both about very weak pieces of evidence. The key to this high difficulty question is learning how to balance weak evidence. Pedagogically, don’t let this question train you out of your instincts about weak evidence. If you hate drawing a conclusion from the evidence in A, you have good instincts! Now lets discuss why the evidence here is weak. First, the “seems Martian” meteorite. The meteorite is hedged (“seems,” “if indeed”), and (here I agree with Lin), is about a single impact. The crater evidence, while based on many observations, comes from only one planet and uses a technique the passage itself highlights as hard to interpret and potentially overwritten. By itself, A doesn't allow any conclusion to the rest of the inner solar system (Venus, Mercury, etc.), so it is an extraordinarily weak basis for “limited to Earth–Moon.”
Still, getting rid of the “seems Martian” rock (D) does support T3. (A) also supports T3, weakly. The relevant thing is the interaction. Spotting that interaction is the difficult skill this question rewards. (A) doesn't just weakly suggest that there was not an LHB-like intensity increase on Mars, it also undercuts the meteorite data because it acts upstream of the meteorite in the causal chain where LHB impact leads to (debris and crater) leads to Martian debris meteorite impacting on Earth. The key is recognizing that A does two weak things at once, not pretending A is strong or generalizable to the entire inner solar system. If the crater survey had been elsewhere, say Venus, D would be the answer. It's only because without evidence of LHB-like impacts on Mars we're forced to further reduce the likelihood that the meteroite in the passage is actually from Mars, that (A) comes out on top.
@dh2303 What I'm seeing is an alternate take on why A is stronger than D. But I don't quite see how this shows the theory put forth in the video explanation is wrong. Can you elaborate on why you think the video explanation is wrong?
I'm using the following framework:
(1) If the LHB extended to the inner solar system, then we'd expect to see increased intensity of bombardment throughout the entire inner solar system (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Moon, Mars).
(2) (A) provides evidence that we don't see increased intensity where we'd expect to see it.
(3) (D) does not, because the LHB-inner-solar-system theory doesn't lead to an expectation that the specific rock should have come from outside the Earth-Moon system.
I gather from your comment that if (A) had been about Venus, it'd be wrong, that you disagree with step (1) in the analysis above.
@Kevin_Lin Yes, you've identified a key part of the disagreement. My understanding is the scope overlap between A and D is required for A to be the best answer. This comes textually from the explicit weakening of crater surveys as a source of evidence in P2 and the limitation of the evidence to an extensive survey of one poorly generalizable location. If the stem had asked for what MSS the view that the LHB did not involve Mars, then the balance changes. But it doesn't. We are not evaluating the weakening of a hypothesis that the LHB covered the whole inner solar system. We are evaluating strenghtening of a hypothesis that the LHB was limited to the Earth and the Moon. Given that, I think you need logical coverage of the rock data with the scope of the crater survey for A to clearly be correct. Not to wax pedagogical, but in my answer journal, I've decided to call this the scientist trap, as a certain high scoring profile is tempted to limit understanding of the evidence to the 'figure' that may have produced it, and is wary of using logical coverage to assess the balance. It's a hueristic that happens in a flash for someone with hard scientist training, and it's appropriately penalized here. To be clear, the reasoning move I objected to in your explanation isn't the scientist trap. They're just parallel in that they independently strengthen one type of evidence for the wrong reason. The structural coverage of A's scope over D's scope drives the choice
got the question right but did not follow your explanation at all in this video tbh
this was just wayyy over my head no matter how hard I try to gage my brain into thinking about a subject I am less than comfortable with, cause in law that is what we are going to have to do, but for the purposes of LSAT and timing, this would have been an automatic skip. In a real-world setting I think I would have like to dedicate more time to this specific subject matter if it were a case.
Isn't Answer Choice A flawed in way that lack of evidence concluding the thing is false ?
@wifi-router it is, and that is one of the reasons D is tempting. But the question is about the relative strength of A and D. A is stronger than D, despite not being air-tight.
I always suck as these types of questions. It is very much not okay.
@AvaEnglish 180 score, no need to beat yourself you got this.
him saying that this is one of the most tempting traps in RC makes me feel better about choosing D but this questions still makes me want to cry 😭😭😭 level 6 ass question
What's the level of difficulty this question is?
@DaishaiJohnson the 7sage analytics says 50% of 180 scorers got it wrong. So it's as hard as they get.
oh hell no
whattt the helllyy
I understand why A is right but I would 100% get this wrong without being walked through it
yea so ill be skipping questions like this on test day. what a waste of time
This type of question is really important to capture flaws in our reasoning. I see that in the comments there is debate about A being right because it fails to clearly communicate how the lack of intensity of projectiles striking Mars during the LHB period would show no support for hypothesis 2.
But I do think A can be seen as ruling out and failing to support hypothesis 2. This is because the time period mentioned allows us to make the inference that we would see an increase in intensity of projectiles striking Mars during the period '3-4' billion year period, while seeing a decline in the '4-5' billion year period. However, if as A says there is a lack of evidence for the increase in intensity during the 3-5 billion years, either before or after the conclusion as hypothesis 2 would suggest, then hypothesis 2 is not supported at least for one inner solar system planet—Mars.
very happy to have gotten this right!
crying sobbing throwing up dying live laugh loving rn
When the question states there was no evidence of "increasing intensity" my mind goes to the possibility that it was already intense - hence supporting the outside the moon/earth system - and that an increase from a large amount of intensity to a crazy amount of intensity is not saying the same thing as there was no evidence found on Mars for the intensity of bombardment associated with the LHB. I got rid of this choice based on the ambiguity of increased intensity. How could have I approached this better without discounting this concept in other questions where it is important to recognize
@BaconCubed I approached this with a POE lens. None of the other ACs definitively rule out the possibility of the LHB affecting Mars, they just reaffirm that it did affect Earth and the moon. We already know that the moon and Earth experienced the LHB, but right now Mars is just speculation. However, no matter how intense the existing projectile intensity was on Mars before the LHB, the assumption is that it would have increased even more as the bombardment increased, but if there's n evidence of this we have no reason to believe that the Mars rock that was found wasn't just a rare occurrence but part of the LHB.
They also ratcheted up the difficulty by having A say "during the period three billion to five billion years ago" instead of "during the late heavy bombardment." Basically adding in another logical move for you to make: recognizing that the LHB occurred 4 billion years ago.
Is there any way to see the curve for these types of questions (ones not given to us in drill format)?
@nickiqueenofrap i go to another tab where I have the classic 7sage website pulled up to see the curve. This question was wild. 59% guessed AC: D and 30% guessed AC: A. AC: A 162 scorer has a 25% chance of getting this right, and a 180 scorer has a 50 percent chance. Hard question.
pain