Anyone else just start yelling at the screen when he starts trying to explain how he got to the word glacial periods, "you just made up the word!!" Like, how? I will never be out here like oh yeah what is the opposite of interglacial, glacial! like no. I am over here being like it doesn't tell us in the question and we should not try to use outside knowledge on this test like wtf????
I think the idea of "winner" is just in reference to the comparison. The rest of the sentence then tell us there's no evidence for that particular comparison. So, there's no evidence that humans act selfishly more often.
There no evidence that [X occurs more often than Y].
I also struggled with this one for the same reason. Based on the video explanation what I gathered was that we need to ignore the subject and predicate and focus mainly on the object. Breaking it down it would look like this:
No statistical evidence (subject)
is provided to show (predicate/verb)
that humans act selfishly more often than they act unselfishly. (object)
By ignoring the subject and predicate you end up with the claim:
-Humans act selfishly more often than they act unselfishly.-
Now with the claim looking like this it becomes very straightforward.
Okay I had the same qualm as the other commenters before me. In line with the negative comparatives lesson, this seems to be a really clear example of one of those either/or situations. In the first example that lesson used, "no more" was also used. This is what I wrote for the question and (give or take a few wording changes), I really think it is correct:
No statistical evidence is provided to show that humans act selfishly more often than they act unselfishly.
1) Humans acting selfishly (A) v. Humans acting unselfishly (B)
2) What occurs more often?
3) Either/or...either humans act equally selfishly and unselfishly OR B wins
^I reason that A CAN'T win because the comparison explicitly states that no scientific evidence has confirmed that humans would act more selfishly than unselfishly. If the "2" in this case is "what occurs more," A can't win.
To be honest that still does not make any sense to me. The first part of the sentence has direct implications for the comparison. If you are trying to parse out the meaning of the sentence, then implying that there is a winner makes the actual meaning of the sentence in context (that it either could be equally likely that people act unselfishly vs selfishly OR acting unselfishly is more likely) more confusing. I think that means you could potentially miss the meaning of the sentence as a whole, and get the entire question wrong on the LSAT.
It definitely makes sense to ignore the subject and predicate verb and focus on the object, OR, in the case that there is no object (just subject verb), we should focus on the verb modifiers.
For example, in the seawater question, if we ignored the subject and verb predicate, "The composition of seawater changes..." the remaining part of the sentence, "more slowly than it does in interglacial periods," isn't even the object; rather, it's a modifier to the predicate verb.
I amend my statement. There are actually three different options that comparison could imply. Either way, the idea of a winner could potentially obscure those three options.
Suggestion - I think the skill builders, available throughout the course, would be even more helpful if a "shuffle" function were to become available.
For this specific skill builder, questions with the same "complication" are always grouped together.
Being presented with comparatives, involving the same type of complication, for several questions in a row, is less helpful than being presented with questions involving comparatives with "shuffled" complications.
@jcar787 be kinder to yourself, don't fall into the trap of belittling yourself just cause you do not understand something the first time around! These things are hard especially if you do not have any previous experience, give yourself some grace! practice practice practice and you'll get there!
If there is (paraphrased) "no statistical evidence provided to show that humans act selfishly more often than they act unselfishly", how can we say the winner of the comparison is that humans act selfishly? Is it not that they have no evidence to show this? Meaning we cannot say with any certainty at all whether or not humans act more or less selfishly. I guess ultimately it feels like claiming that humans act selfishly as the winner is based on some unstated assumption that I'm not sure is entirely reasonable to assume??
Hi! I got this wrong too. The answer that the video gives makes me uncomfy but I think I understand. 100% chance I make this mistake again though.
The comparative statement is only within the Object Clause. I think what makes this question so confusing is that while all of the other comparative statements we have seen are (presumably) the author's argument, this one is just a clause within an overarching statement.
The way the video explained like a math problem where you have to do the work in the brackets first, and then you apply the information outside the brackets for the full understanding and context makes sense.
* mostly wrote this to help me solidify my own understanding :)
I think that the beginning of #4 "no statistical evidence is provided to show" doesn't really matter since it's just the author's idea/commentary on the actual argument, which is the idea that humans act selfishly more often than they act unselfishly. Right now, we are just focusing on the argument, not the author's specific opinion on the argument.
I was confused on this as well. I interpreted this as a negative comparison. In my opinion, we are just thinking about it in a deeper level than the exercise is calling for. In his breakdown in the video he said "We do not know. There could be more evidence or there could not be." With that being the case, I feel as though my breakdown is not incorrect.
I broke it down like this:
evidence that humans act selfishly vs evidence that humans act unselfishly
which occurs more often
they could be equal or there could be evidence that they act unselfishly more often
I thought the same thing. But, looking at the explanation, they say "The statement asserts that there's no statistical evidence provided to show that this comparison is true." You first have to understand what the comparison is before you can understand if the author thinks it is true or not. For clarity, it could be written,
'Some people believe that people act selfishly more often than they act selflessly. But there is no provided statistical evidence to prove this belief.'
This would be a much clearer way to write an idea that gets you to the same conclusion. You have a clear comparison in the first sentence (which is what this exercise is trying to help you pull out) and then a reason why the author thinks you shouldn't believe that comparison in the second sentence.
I think the problem is when we use the term 'winner' we think of truth or victory. It really just means which has the 'traitiness' that the comparison desires. By 'traitiness' I mean the desired trait. I think it makes it a little less of a loaded word.
Does anyone have any tips for navigating questions like #4? I got it incorrect because I interpreted it as "Because no statistical evidence is provided", humans act selfishly and unselfishly to an equal amount or are unselfish more often. Obviously this is wrong, and the grammatical explanation makes sense, but it's often I find myself tripping up on questions like this that don't follow the conventions of Canada/English grammar or have Oxford commas.
@ArjunK Well, technically, you are right. I think this is just a drill that makes you REALLY sensitive to identifying and understanding comparatives.
The question, for the sake of analysis, is divided into two parts: the comparative and the contextual. The comparative:
"humans act selfishly more often than they act unselfishly,"
If taken by itself, it does mean comparatively that more often, people are selfish.
BUT as the video says, when considering the context:
"No statistical evidence is provided to show that..."
We don't know if the comparison is true because we have no evidence.
Think of this example:
"No evidence shows that cats jump higher than dogs."
The comparative part says "cats jump higher than dogs," but do we know that for certain? No, because we don't have evidence to show that. In the previous lessons, we were told to make reasonable inferences. Is it a reasonable inference to believe that cats jump higher than dogs without evidence showing it? Highly unlikely.
We can apply this same reasonable inference to the question. Is it reasonable to infer that humans act more selfishly than unselfishly without evidence showing it to be true? Highly unlikely. Therefore, even though we can identify that the question is trying to tell us "hey, there's a comparison here," it is not reasonable to draw a conclusion from the comparison because there is no evidence for it.
TLDR: For those of you who thought that #4 has no comparative, technically, you are right.
@MarcusTsang Thanks for this explanation. Similar to Arjun my thought process was that since there is no evidence of humans acting selfishly more than unselfishly, they must act selfishly and unselfishly equally or they act unselfishly more often than selfishly. Now from your explanation I know that there is no evidence for either really in the claim. But my biggest takeaway from the negative comparisons lesson was the two correct interpretations that can come from a negative comparative relationship. But in this case a lack of evidence for X>Y doesn't necessarily imply evidence for X=Y or Y>X because there's no evidence for anything? I'm a bit confused about how to draw inferences from these sorts of questions, but I guess that's the point that no inferences can be drawn in either direction because there's no evidence provided?
Same! I was not really understanding how this statement was saying that humans act SELFISHLY more often than they act unselfishly, as it started off by saying that there is no statistical evidence of this. It helped to separate the comparative statement and focusing on that first.
Would we be expected to infer the comparison of interglacial periods to glacial periods? I compared interglacial periods to "non interglacial periods". my way is less efficient but does it miss any information?
@lizaloug97880 I did the same thing for that question. Even though I went about it with "non" interglacial periods rather than glacial periods I still got the same breakdown as the video explanation. Does that help at all?
@lizaloug97880 In my opinion, I think that your method is preferred. When we arrive to the Conditional Logic module, a necessary practice taught is that when "negating" something, we should put the word "not" in front of the word, instead of flipping the word to its opposite. This is because you may easily overlook the possibility for things being equal to still be true.
For example:
Chris is taller than melissa.
Negated: Chris is not taller than Melissa. Note: It is not Chris is shorter than Melissa because that would overlook the possibility that they can still be equal in height.
Applying this principle to the explanation, I agree that the tutor's explanation relies on the assumption that the only periods that are not interglacial are glacial. Thus, I believe you are correct.
@CollinEsquirol It is not expecting background, but just grammatical understanding. The prefix "inter-" means "between" or "among". “Interglacial” literally means between glacial periods. The natural binary contrast is: glacial periods v interglacial periods.
@CollinEsquirol I said to myself while reading the statement: Normal periods vs. interglacial periods. Which is not "correct" but it didn't matter in terms of my understanding.
@CollinEsquirol You can use the idea of "translating" sentences with inferring so you could end up with something like The composition of seawater changes more slowly than it does in interglacial periods (as compared to what?) as compared to other periods. You don't have to use glacial periods verbatim.
@Littlebowpink I got this one right but used the wrong terminology. Instead of glacial periods I wrote “non-interglacial periods” because I didnt know the right fit for the opposite haha
@DouglasNeumeyer it understand that it is inferred, but doesn't inferring that mean you have to know something about glacial periods? I'm sorry, but i do not know a damn thing about glacial periods. . . . if this is common knowledge to be inferred, I'm cooked.
Soooo I'm very confused on question 4 - since there is no statistical evidence to show that the comparative statement is even true, how can we say that humans do act more selfishly? How can we actually declare that the "winner" since the beginning part of the statement essentially says we don't know if this is true?
I was very confused by question 4. When I fist analyzed the question I thought that there was no winner because there is no statistical evidence to show that people act selfishly more than they act unselfishly. Looking over the explanation it seems that I completely disregarded the "more often" in the sentence. However, I feel like questions similar to Q4 would be very difficult to identify.
To clarify, is question 4 a negative comparison? There is no statistical evidence to show that A happens more often than B, suggesting that there is no "clear" winner. If we were provided more context, we would then have to infer whether humans act selfishly more often than unselfishly? Or, am I to disregard "No statistical evidence is provided to show..." because the "kernel" of the comparison is in the latter part of the sentence? Sorry if this is a silly question
I completely disregarded it because thats what we were trained to do in this entire section, just get the main idea of the sentence but in this case to find out the winner, then yes I guess we would have to pay attention to it
I agree, the way you analyze the sentence determines the correct answer. If we include the context, i.e. the beginning phrase, then I would argue there is no "winner". I am confused by this question.
248 comments
lol how is this supposed to take 30 minutes.
Question four starts with “no statistical evidence” and my brain is like well clearly there’s no winner
gotta fight my brain
oh lord the 4th one was terrible
lmao "4 is pretty straight forward" oh...
Anyone else just start yelling at the screen when he starts trying to explain how he got to the word glacial periods, "you just made up the word!!" Like, how? I will never be out here like oh yeah what is the opposite of interglacial, glacial! like no. I am over here being like it doesn't tell us in the question and we should not try to use outside knowledge on this test like wtf????
Why would the winner in Q 4 be "humans acting selfishly?" Is it not a negative comparative and therefore equally likely to be that the two are equal?
I think the idea of "winner" is just in reference to the comparison. The rest of the sentence then tell us there's no evidence for that particular comparison. So, there's no evidence that humans act selfishly more often.
There no evidence that [X occurs more often than Y].
Same here! I came up with the same conclusion. So confused :(
I had a question about this too. Would like to hear back from one of the moderators.
I also struggled with this one for the same reason. Based on the video explanation what I gathered was that we need to ignore the subject and predicate and focus mainly on the object. Breaking it down it would look like this:
No statistical evidence (subject)
is provided to show (predicate/verb)
that humans act selfishly more often than they act unselfishly. (object)
By ignoring the subject and predicate you end up with the claim:
-Humans act selfishly more often than they act unselfishly.-
Now with the claim looking like this it becomes very straightforward.
1-humans act selfishly vs humans act unselfishly
2-which one happens more often
3-humans act selfishly
That's the only way I could make sense of it.
Okay I had the same qualm as the other commenters before me. In line with the negative comparatives lesson, this seems to be a really clear example of one of those either/or situations. In the first example that lesson used, "no more" was also used. This is what I wrote for the question and (give or take a few wording changes), I really think it is correct:
No statistical evidence is provided to show that humans act selfishly more often than they act unselfishly.
1) Humans acting selfishly (A) v. Humans acting unselfishly (B)
2) What occurs more often?
3) Either/or...either humans act equally selfishly and unselfishly OR B wins
^I reason that A CAN'T win because the comparison explicitly states that no scientific evidence has confirmed that humans would act more selfishly than unselfishly. If the "2" in this case is "what occurs more," A can't win.
To be honest that still does not make any sense to me. The first part of the sentence has direct implications for the comparison. If you are trying to parse out the meaning of the sentence, then implying that there is a winner makes the actual meaning of the sentence in context (that it either could be equally likely that people act unselfishly vs selfishly OR acting unselfishly is more likely) more confusing. I think that means you could potentially miss the meaning of the sentence as a whole, and get the entire question wrong on the LSAT.
#feedback I reasoned the exact same way. Why wouldn't this be a negative comparison situation?
I also reasoned this way
It definitely makes sense to ignore the subject and predicate verb and focus on the object, OR, in the case that there is no object (just subject verb), we should focus on the verb modifiers.
For example, in the seawater question, if we ignored the subject and verb predicate, "The composition of seawater changes..." the remaining part of the sentence, "more slowly than it does in interglacial periods," isn't even the object; rather, it's a modifier to the predicate verb.
What do y'all think?
I amend my statement. There are actually three different options that comparison could imply. Either way, the idea of a winner could potentially obscure those three options.
Suggestion - I think the skill builders, available throughout the course, would be even more helpful if a "shuffle" function were to become available.
For this specific skill builder, questions with the same "complication" are always grouped together.
Being presented with comparatives, involving the same type of complication, for several questions in a row, is less helpful than being presented with questions involving comparatives with "shuffled" complications.
#admin #suggestion
I compare this type of skill building to exercising. You wouldn't do a round of jumping jacks, and then squats, and then go back to jumping jacks.
Agreed. Shuffling could cause confusion. Just go back and review each section independently.
Every time I continue studying I feel more stupid than before
@jcar787 be kinder to yourself, don't fall into the trap of belittling yourself just cause you do not understand something the first time around! These things are hard especially if you do not have any previous experience, give yourself some grace! practice practice practice and you'll get there!
@jcar787 lmao same I want to quit
For question #4:
If there is (paraphrased) "no statistical evidence provided to show that humans act selfishly more often than they act unselfishly", how can we say the winner of the comparison is that humans act selfishly? Is it not that they have no evidence to show this? Meaning we cannot say with any certainty at all whether or not humans act more or less selfishly. I guess ultimately it feels like claiming that humans act selfishly as the winner is based on some unstated assumption that I'm not sure is entirely reasonable to assume??
Hi! I got this wrong too. The answer that the video gives makes me uncomfy but I think I understand. 100% chance I make this mistake again though.
The comparative statement is only within the Object Clause. I think what makes this question so confusing is that while all of the other comparative statements we have seen are (presumably) the author's argument, this one is just a clause within an overarching statement.
The way the video explained like a math problem where you have to do the work in the brackets first, and then you apply the information outside the brackets for the full understanding and context makes sense.
* mostly wrote this to help me solidify my own understanding :)
I think that the beginning of #4 "no statistical evidence is provided to show" doesn't really matter since it's just the author's idea/commentary on the actual argument, which is the idea that humans act selfishly more often than they act unselfishly. Right now, we are just focusing on the argument, not the author's specific opinion on the argument.
I was confused on this as well. I interpreted this as a negative comparison. In my opinion, we are just thinking about it in a deeper level than the exercise is calling for. In his breakdown in the video he said "We do not know. There could be more evidence or there could not be." With that being the case, I feel as though my breakdown is not incorrect.
I broke it down like this:
evidence that humans act selfishly vs evidence that humans act unselfishly
which occurs more often
they could be equal or there could be evidence that they act unselfishly more often
I thought the same thing. But, looking at the explanation, they say "The statement asserts that there's no statistical evidence provided to show that this comparison is true." You first have to understand what the comparison is before you can understand if the author thinks it is true or not. For clarity, it could be written,
'Some people believe that people act selfishly more often than they act selflessly. But there is no provided statistical evidence to prove this belief.'
This would be a much clearer way to write an idea that gets you to the same conclusion. You have a clear comparison in the first sentence (which is what this exercise is trying to help you pull out) and then a reason why the author thinks you shouldn't believe that comparison in the second sentence.
I think the problem is when we use the term 'winner' we think of truth or victory. It really just means which has the 'traitiness' that the comparison desires. By 'traitiness' I mean the desired trait. I think it makes it a little less of a loaded word.
Does anyone have any tips for navigating questions like #4? I got it incorrect because I interpreted it as "Because no statistical evidence is provided", humans act selfishly and unselfishly to an equal amount or are unselfish more often. Obviously this is wrong, and the grammatical explanation makes sense, but it's often I find myself tripping up on questions like this that don't follow the conventions of Canada/English grammar or have Oxford commas.
@ArjunK Well, technically, you are right. I think this is just a drill that makes you REALLY sensitive to identifying and understanding comparatives.
The question, for the sake of analysis, is divided into two parts: the comparative and the contextual. The comparative:
"humans act selfishly more often than they act unselfishly,"
If taken by itself, it does mean comparatively that more often, people are selfish.
BUT as the video says, when considering the context:
"No statistical evidence is provided to show that..."
We don't know if the comparison is true because we have no evidence.
Think of this example:
"No evidence shows that cats jump higher than dogs."
The comparative part says "cats jump higher than dogs," but do we know that for certain? No, because we don't have evidence to show that. In the previous lessons, we were told to make reasonable inferences. Is it a reasonable inference to believe that cats jump higher than dogs without evidence showing it? Highly unlikely.
We can apply this same reasonable inference to the question. Is it reasonable to infer that humans act more selfishly than unselfishly without evidence showing it to be true? Highly unlikely. Therefore, even though we can identify that the question is trying to tell us "hey, there's a comparison here," it is not reasonable to draw a conclusion from the comparison because there is no evidence for it.
TLDR: For those of you who thought that #4 has no comparative, technically, you are right.
@MarcusTsang Thanks for this explanation. Similar to Arjun my thought process was that since there is no evidence of humans acting selfishly more than unselfishly, they must act selfishly and unselfishly equally or they act unselfishly more often than selfishly. Now from your explanation I know that there is no evidence for either really in the claim. But my biggest takeaway from the negative comparisons lesson was the two correct interpretations that can come from a negative comparative relationship. But in this case a lack of evidence for X>Y doesn't necessarily imply evidence for X=Y or Y>X because there's no evidence for anything? I'm a bit confused about how to draw inferences from these sorts of questions, but I guess that's the point that no inferences can be drawn in either direction because there's no evidence provided?
Me when he started the explanation to Q4 with, "this one is pretty straightforward." ಠಿ_ಠ
Literally me. The first half of that sentence tripped me up so bad
Same! I was not really understanding how this statement was saying that humans act SELFISHLY more often than they act unselfishly, as it started off by saying that there is no statistical evidence of this. It helped to separate the comparative statement and focusing on that first.
def did not take me 30 minutes ;_;
4/5. I thought they were comparing giant raccoons and padnas on their similarity to bears.
Would we be expected to infer the comparison of interglacial periods to glacial periods? I compared interglacial periods to "non interglacial periods". my way is less efficient but does it miss any information?
@lizaloug97880 I did the same thing for that question. Even though I went about it with "non" interglacial periods rather than glacial periods I still got the same breakdown as the video explanation. Does that help at all?
@lizaloug97880 In my opinion, I think that your method is preferred. When we arrive to the Conditional Logic module, a necessary practice taught is that when "negating" something, we should put the word "not" in front of the word, instead of flipping the word to its opposite. This is because you may easily overlook the possibility for things being equal to still be true.
For example:
Chris is taller than melissa.
Negated: Chris is not taller than Melissa. Note: It is not Chris is shorter than Melissa because that would overlook the possibility that they can still be equal in height.
Applying this principle to the explanation, I agree that the tutor's explanation relies on the assumption that the only periods that are not interglacial are glacial. Thus, I believe you are correct.
Question 2 does not make sense. How are you supposed to infer glacial from interglacial without any background?
@CollinEsquirol It is not expecting background, but just grammatical understanding. The prefix "inter-" means "between" or "among". “Interglacial” literally means between glacial periods. The natural binary contrast is: glacial periods v interglacial periods.
@CollinEsquirol I said to myself while reading the statement: Normal periods vs. interglacial periods. Which is not "correct" but it didn't matter in terms of my understanding.
@Bayside That's what i said
@CollinEsquirol You can use the idea of "translating" sentences with inferring so you could end up with something like The composition of seawater changes more slowly than it does in interglacial periods (as compared to what?) as compared to other periods. You don't have to use glacial periods verbatim.
lol I went either/or on question 4
I said non interglacial periods vs interglacial periods because I feel like that is a safer assumption than glacial periods. Idk
@besrawi same
@besrawi Yes, that helps a lot. Interglacial sounds like a specific scientific terminology to me and it is hard to imply " glacial".
But, when answering questions, I think it is stated in a way that we can imply it.
When doing drills, I was too hesitant to imply things, but this example is helpful.
I found this to be a bit challenging there was a couple of questions that the answers did not make sense.
Question 4 confused me, i wrote:
1. selfishly vs. unselfishly
2. how much statistical evidence is provided to show that humans act selfishly more often than they act unselfishly
3. winner: either humans act equally selfishly and unselfishly or humans act more unselfishly
Can someone explain why this would be wrong?
@helisa18 I agree with you.
@helisa18 throw out the statistical evidence bit, it's context that we don't need to evaluate the comparison.
Your new prompt now reads: Humans act selfishly more often than they act unselfishly.
Apply the 3 steps to this prompt and boom you have the answer.
4/5, not sure how I would've been able to get Q2 since I don't know anything about glacial periods. Did anyone else have this issue as well?
@joycetheok sure did!
@Littlebowpink I got this one right but used the wrong terminology. Instead of glacial periods I wrote “non-interglacial periods” because I didnt know the right fit for the opposite haha
@AlenaKane Same!
Q2 confused me because how am I supposed to know about comparing interglacial periods to glacial periods if glacial is not at least mentioned?
@AmiraVanLeeuwen its inferred
@AmiraVanLeeuwen “inter-“ means “between”, so interglacial periods are periods between glacial periods.
@DouglasNeumeyer it understand that it is inferred, but doesn't inferring that mean you have to know something about glacial periods? I'm sorry, but i do not know a damn thing about glacial periods. . . . if this is common knowledge to be inferred, I'm cooked.
Soooo I'm very confused on question 4 - since there is no statistical evidence to show that the comparative statement is even true, how can we say that humans do act more selfishly? How can we actually declare that the "winner" since the beginning part of the statement essentially says we don't know if this is true?
@jozwiakhm I agree was confused if it says no statistical evidence but than JY said selfish is the winner yet there is no evidence.
I was very confused by question 4. When I fist analyzed the question I thought that there was no winner because there is no statistical evidence to show that people act selfishly more than they act unselfishly. Looking over the explanation it seems that I completely disregarded the "more often" in the sentence. However, I feel like questions similar to Q4 would be very difficult to identify.
#feedback I agree! How would we identify these types of questions?
To clarify, is question 4 a negative comparison? There is no statistical evidence to show that A happens more often than B, suggesting that there is no "clear" winner. If we were provided more context, we would then have to infer whether humans act selfishly more often than unselfishly? Or, am I to disregard "No statistical evidence is provided to show..." because the "kernel" of the comparison is in the latter part of the sentence? Sorry if this is a silly question
I completely disregarded it because thats what we were trained to do in this entire section, just get the main idea of the sentence but in this case to find out the winner, then yes I guess we would have to pay attention to it
I agree, the way you analyze the sentence determines the correct answer. If we include the context, i.e. the beginning phrase, then I would argue there is no "winner". I am confused by this question.
videos for this section would've helped 😭
honestly !!
Man this was a great, solid lesson but a hella slog LOL. It's 3:35 where I am I am going to SLEEP good luck everyone!