I'm having trouble negating and translating the first sentence of this question. How am I supposed to negate a sentence with two group four indicators?

Despite reviewing JY's explanation (https://classic.7sage.com/lsat_explanations/lsat-20-section-4-question-25/), I don't understand why answer choice (C) is incorrect while (D) is correct.

For one thing, how is answer choice (C) different from PT29 - S1 - Q16 (https://classic.7sage.com/lsat_explanations/lsat-29-section-1-question-16/) correct answer choice (B)? There, (B) said "some..." and JY said even though the "some" may or may not address the case addressed in the stimulus, it could still potentially weaken the argument. So then why can't answer choice (C)s "Not all" in this case use the same reasoning?

Moreover, answer choice (D) talks about being able to control an involuntary action which just seems to deny the premise that Marianne's actions are involuntary. This also says nothing about whether or not you should be held responsible. Being held responsible for an action that you can control is a further assumption we would have to make.

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Which one of the following, if true, most strengthens the teacher's argument?

(A) A journalist undermines his or her own professional standing by submitting for publication statements that, not being attributed to a named source, are rejected for being implausible, unoriginal, or dull.

Can someone explain why A is the correct answer choice? I feel like I'm not getting the conditional logic of this question.

I diagrammed as AP (accepted for publication) --> HP (highly plausible) or HO (highly original) or HI (high interest among audience). I think the contrapositive should be ~HP and ~HO and ~HI --> ~AP. But I think A is doing ~HP or ~HO or ~HI --> ~AP. Am I missing something?

I am retaking some of the 70's PT's to get ready for Saturday (fingers crossed!). Most of the LR is no problem for me, I just was hoping for a bit of a discussion on a few questions, maybe someone can critique my reasoning? So here it is:

This is an extremely tricky strengthen question for me.The stimulus doesn't ACTUALLY mention that population growth will continue, which is the flaw I suppose. IF the trend doesn't continue, then there is no need to address concerns. Beyond that, the argument DOES indeed note that the planets resources allow for "food to be produced" at several times what it is now, and that there is a maximum to it. Answer choice B (the one I picked way back when) doesn't mention food shortages, so that is a count against it, but I am caught on the terms here "food resources from ... the ocean ... will eventually be fully utilized". To me that could be a counter to the objection, "maybe food has a maximum PRODUCTION amount, but we fish from the oceans, which doesn't count as PRODUCING, its more like procuring." I read produce here to mean "to compose, create, or bring out by intellectual or physical effort" [Merriam-Webster def. 6]. I suppose LSAC here means "to give birth or rise to : yield" [Merriam-Webster def 2]. Anyone find this a bit frustrating? Thoughts on how to avoid confusion when they try to play tricks on language?

https://classic.7sage.com/lsat_explanations/lsat-72-section-2-question-07/

Is it possible to have 2 answer choice that both weaken the argument but to different degree?

Also, for the weakening question in general, if I have to make an additional assumption to believe one of the AC could possibly weaken, then it would generally be wrong, right? Perhaps subtle ones don't necessarily do this..

Am I in the right mindset for this? I would really appreciate if someone could confirm my thoughts on this.

Is taking two pretests the week of my actual LSAT too much? I don't want to get burnt out but I feel like the more I take the more prepared I feel. Advice anyone?

In the Powerscore logical reasoning bible (under conditional reasoning) there is a statement saying "No robot can think." They say that the diagram is R ---> /T (if an entity is a robot, then it cannot think). Im just confused as to how being a robot is the sufficient condition, and in general how they got this diagram. Im also getting confused on how they describe these relationships.

Thanks!

I went through the RC in the 70's to try to glean some more information and feel more comfortable going into the sections. Nothing super profound, but I was at least able to categorize them by their most common types. Feel free to add any other common structures that you find!

Straight/Regular Passages:

Comparative Passages:

Passage A:

Passage B:

Hello! So I'm fool proofing the LG bundles now, at first I was doing like 6-7 new per day. Now I'm finding that by the 3-4 new LG/day it's a mental drain & I didn't take into consideration the repeats. Does anyone have a good number of LG/daily that's realistic for daily routine while keeping up with RC & LR. I'm trying to finish them within 2 months. Any feedback will be really helpful :-)

I have a question for answer choice A for the second question on "mental contortions." Although I got this question correct, I was really hesitant on marking A the right answer due to the word "beforehand." In the context of the passage, it states that "judges' instructions to juries to ignore information learned outside the courtroom" could not be "relied upon," and such instruction would become "mental contortions" to the jurors.

In my mind, information learned outside the courtroom (where prejudice can be formed) can be formed not only before the trial, but also in the middle of a trial, and therefore, I thought answer choice A was incorrect as it limits the scope to only before the trial (hence, descriptively inaccurate). However, I eventually chose A because all the other answer choices also limited the scope to "pretrial," which really confused me...

I'm actually a native South Korean student, so I may be unfamiliar with the concept of a "trial." If we are to assume that there is a certain case that lasts several days, and the parties of the case go to court several times to dispute the case, to my understanding, this as a whole would still be one trial. Therefore, I thought that juror prejudices could be formed in the middle of a trial (or, during a trial), as they would go to court, and then go home (get information outside the courtroom), then go to court, then go home, etc.

I would really like some clarification on this and any help would be great!

https://classic.7sage.com/lsat_explanations/lsat-27-section-3-passage-1-passage/

https://classic.7sage.com/lsat_explanations/lsat-27-section-3-passage-1-questions/

Logic games used to be like another language to me but it has gotten to be my best section as of now. However, when the clock is ticking, everything i know about LG seems to go out the window. When I BR my test (during untimed conditions of corse), all the inferences that i should have made under timed conditions come to me almost instantly. Its extremely frustrating that I can do them but the pressure of time prevents me from performing to my full capability. I imagine it is because one can reasonably anticipate what the RC and LR will entail but with LG they can really throw anything at you. Does anyone else have this issue? Any tips or advice would be appreciated. I really want to get LG down pat as i'm taking the lsat next week (Feb 4th). Freezing up on LG is dramatically bringing my score down from what it can be even though I feel most prepared for it.

Hi, I am having a hard time differentiating between a cause and effect and a conditional statement. Would anyone have tips or tricks?

Hey everyone, just wanted to get clarification on something. I find myself, when confronted with a MBT or SA question, immediately translating to logic. It is hard for me to find the correct answer choice otherwise. However, it does seem to eat up some time. Is there a better strategy to approach these questions? I would be very comfortable with the questions if it wasn't for the timing element, due to the formulaic nature of their structures.

Hey everyone,

I'm having trouble clearly identifying the assumptions in logical reasoning questions. I understand the difference between necessary vs. sufficient assumptions, overlooked possibilities & mismatched concepts. But, during my timed practices, the assumption is not clicking in my head. Any advice or tips would be greatly appreciated. Maybe even a new way of approaching the stimulus?

Sorry for the ominous title, but I'm really conflicted on what to do, and friends/family aren't objective enough to give me a solid response.

I am Canadian and applied to 7 schools across the country, I wrote the LSAT in December after delaying the September exam after studying for 4 months. I wrote in December because I felt like I had to, since I had already submitted all my applications and was dead set on attending law school in 2017.

I didn't feel great writing in December, and left the exam feeling like I would need to rewrite. I got my score back and scored 10 below my average, 155, and have a personal high of hitting 171 on a few preptests. My struggle section is LR by a long shot - average about 6-8 wrong per section, and -12 on the section on the December test. I'm not sure if my issue is stamina or lacking the fundamental knowledge for the question types. I average between 0 -4 on LG, and between -4 -6 on RC.

I recently decided, due to pressure from family/friends and myself to write the test in February because my main concern would be losing this application cycle and the money used to apply. My scores have improved slightly from taking a month long break, I came back and got 171 on my first PT since my break, and gotten 169, 168 etc since.

My main question for the community then is this, do I grind it out and hopefully save this application cycle, or sit it out and write in June or September and maybe still get accepted this year? I also emailed my schools I applied to and told them I would be writing in February and to put my application on hold, would it not look bad to then go back and tell them to change it back?

The statements provide the most support for holding that Sandra would disagree with Taylor about which one of the following statements?

Answer: D) Some sciences can yield mathematically precise results that are not inherently suspect.

Okay, so I answered this incorrectly on the diagnostic, and watched the video explaining what the correct answer choice was. I'm still a bit confused. This type of question is a disagreement question, which means that the right answer choice has to be a statement that one of the two speakers agrees with and the other disagrees with. In this passage, Taylor and Sandra are arguing about whether or not all mathematically precise claims should be subject to skepticism. Taylor clearly holds that all mathematically precise claims are suspect, while Sandra believes that some scientific disciplines can obtain precise results which are not suspect.

D clearly aligns with Sandra's argument, but I am confused by the wording of this question. It says the statements above provide the most support for holding that Sandra would disagree with Taylor about one of the following statements. Doesn't that mean we are looking for a statement that Taylor believes in and Sandra disagrees with?

https://classic.7sage.com/lsat_explanations/lsat-june-2007-section-2-question-16/

Hoping someone has some advice on this for me. When JY goes over strengthen/weaken questions on LR, he identifies the conclusion and looks for an answer choice that either provides more support for or weakens support that the premises provide for the conclusion. I've been trying to practice answering questions in under 1 minute/20 seconds, and to do this I feel that I can use this approach pretty successfully in general. In general, should I try to come up with an assumption of the argument before I approach the questions? Or would having an assumption in my mind potentially distract me from thoroughly examining the answer choices?

Appreciate any suggestions!

Jeff

Hello all! I was hoping I could get assistance with the order in which I should study for the LSAT! I am taking the exam in September but I thought it's better to study earlier since it's my first time taking the exam! I have been studying logic games for 30 minutes a day for a week now. I was wondering if that's a good amount or the right thing to study first. Should I start with logic games then reasoning then comprehension or is there a better order? I am going to try and do an hour a day for the remainder of the time I have before the exam I just want some good tips starting out so I am best prepaired! Thanks so much!

Even though this question is old, it has several lessons built into it. I was able to parse this question out mainly because of the lessons on 7Sage. The first lesson I see with this question is the importance of being attuned to the grammar of the LSAT. The stimulus begins with “since.” This should reference back to the core curriculum grammar lessons: “since” generally introduces something that we will be using to build towards a conclusion. In other words, we are hurled by the first word of this argument into a premise. We also have an additional premise that is introduced by the word “and.” We then have a comma and the conclusion is given to us in conditional language. I sometimes feel on LR that what I am given in a stimulus is like joining a conversation mid-talk and I am expected to piece together the information into the way the authors want us to. This is a perfect example of that phenomena in my estimation.

The second lesson in this question is the heavy use of conditional language. You have to know your conditional indicators in order to map this question correctly. What we end up getting when we map this question is:

P 1:If you support the new tax plan——>no chance of being elected.

P 2:If you truly understand economics——>Not support the new plan.

C:If you have a chance of being elected——>truly understand economics

The third lesson from this question is the idea that questions are often related in the task they set out for us, a deep understanding of this sits at the bottom of the case for reading the stimulus before the question stem: if you can tell what is wrong from the stimulus this thinking goes, the question stem shouldn't have to be read first (I am not a proponent of this view.) When I lined those conditionals up, out of habit I wanted to find the sufficient assumption. Well it turns out that if we look at this question through a sufficient assumption lens, we can actually garner quite a bit. Lets take the contrapositive of that first statement:

P 1: If you have a chance of being elected——>Not support new tax plan

P 2:If you truly understand economics——>Not support the new plan.

C:If you have a chance of being elected——>truly understand economics

So insofar as the premises supporting the conclusion this isn’t a valid argument. But why? Above there is simply no way to get from the premises to the conclusion. The forth lesson dawned on me when I was BR’ing this question: This is where the flaw really is: as currently stated, the premises do not support the conclusion. Familiar terms are used in the premises and conclusion as a way to distract us, but the conclusion might as well be something about football or motorcycle maintenance. There is simply no support for the given conclusion from the given premises. The relationships between the elements do not support the given conclusion.

This is when we take a look at the fifth lesson embedded in this question and that is to take a close look at the question stem. This isn’t actually asking what the flaw is in the way we are all used to. Instead, this question is asking us for something that the argument ignores the possibility of. More specifically, that the argument ignores the possibility that “some people who _____” The fifth lesson here is how to deny a conditional relationship. So if I were to give you the conditional relationship: All cats are mammals, you would deny that by saying “some things that are cats and not mammals.” The existence of a thing that is both a cat and not a mammal is enough to deny the sufficiency of something being a cat triggering the necessary condition of being a mammal. With this knowledge in mind lets take a closer look at what we are given in the stimulus.

chance of elected———>Not support new tax plan

+

Understands economics——>Not support new tax plan

Conclusion:

Chance elected——>Truly understands economics

How could we make this valid? We could say that Not support new tax plan——>Understands economics!

99 times out of 100, if we have gotten this far and we are stuck, it was actually our translation of the logic where we have gone wrong. Meaning if this was a sufficient assumption question, I would bet that I had translated something wrong. But, we didn’t. The only other possibility is something very peculiar: it appears that our author has given us: Understands economics———>Not support new tax plan, but has interpreted this statement in logic to mean: Not support new tax plan———>Understand economics! If we (wrongly) interpret the second condition as Not support new tax plan———>Understand economics, we have a simple A——>B——>C argument.

This is an incredibly difficult step to take. I am open for correction here, but the idea that we are given a conditional statement, that we translate correctly, but have to take a leap in judgement to conclude that the author might have interpreted that conditional statement wrong is hard enough. Finding where the author’s translation went wrong and then negating that translation to point out the flaw makes this, for my money, the hardest flaw question of all time. The author's assumption here is actually a mistranslation of the logic to: Not support new tax plan———>Understand economics The denial of this is (D)

I look forward to a correspondence with members of this community about this question. Has anyone come across something like this elsewhere? Would it behove us to classify this flaw under the umbrella of sufficient/necessary flaws more generally? Thank you!

David

**Admin note: edited title**

I saw something in a comment somewhere about logic game sets of similar questions to do, and I saw on one explanation JY had "if you struggled with this type of question, here's a bunch more". Are there multiple of these lists/ do these lists exist?

73.4.20 https://classic.7sage.com/lsat_explanations/lsat-73-section-4-question-20/

This is a phenomenon-hypothesis Strengthening question, so we are looking for an answer choice that strengthens the hypothesis or an answer choice that prevents an outside factor from weakening the hypothesis.

The passage is basically saying that the process goes like this: When nerve cells are damaged after a stroke, glutamate can leak from them and can kill other nerve cells. We are left to reasonably presume that this is included in the definition of continuing nerve cell deterioration. Therefore glutamate is present in blood of those whose nerve cells continue to deteriorate after a stroke.

Answer choices (it came down to C and D):

A – incorrect because saying that any neurotransmitter that leaks from damaged nerve cells will damage other nerve cells does not strengthen the relationship we want. It doesn’t give us any more reason to think that glutamate in particular is impacting surrounding nerve cells.

B – incorrect because it’s irrelevant

C – This was very hard to eliminate, but it is incorrect for a couple of reasons. 1) Knowing that it is the only one that leaks from damaged nerve cells doesn’t necessarily impact the relationship. If it does, we have to stretch it with a bit assuming in order to do so (for instance, you have to assume that it actually DOES leak from those nerve cells). 2) It doesn’t rule out the possibility that glutamate could come from five billion other locations in the body. It therefore definitely does not strengthen the statement that glutamate from damaged nerve cells is a cause of brain damage. Just because it is the only neurotransmitter that leaks from oxygen-starved or damaged nerve cells does not mean that it only leaks from those nerve cells. In fact, it leaves the door wide open to think that it could leak from a long list of other places, and we know from the stimulus that we don’t care about those other places. We just want to know if leakage from oxygen-starved or damaged nerve cells causes brain damage, and this answer choice doesn’t give us enough security and clarity for us to be able to do that.

D – This is the correct answer, because it specifies that glutamate can ONLY come from damaged or oxygen-starved nerve cells. This enables us to say (or at least makes it possible for us to say) that glutamate very well could cause brain damage/long-term nerve cell deterioration, since the way it can get into the blood stream in the first place is from oxygen-starved or damaged nerve cells.

E – incorrect because 1) we don’t need to know anything else about nerve cells to conclude that glutamate causes brain damage, and 2) it doesn’t matter that they can leak glutamate and still survive intact. This has no impact on the relationship we are trying to strengthen, since if they were destroyed, it wouldn’t do us any harm or any good.

[Admin edit: replaced with link to question. Please don't post full questions, thanks!]

https://classic.7sage.com/lsat_explanations/lsat-76-section-2-question-24/

We are looking for a necessary assumption.

The conditional for the first sentence is: write in order to give pleasure  /impart truth. However, the conclusion of the argument is that this conditional is not true. They say that if this conditional was true, then you could take any popular book on the shelf and the conditional would be: popular  gave people pleasure  /impart truth. To do this, you would have to assume that if a book gives people pleasure, then it would have to have been written in order to give people pleasure. Just insert the original conditional in right in front of the “/impart truth” part of the equation.

This was counter-intuitive for me because I was immediately looking for a bridge to the conclusion of the stimulus, which is that those who write in order to give pleasure CAN impart truth to their readers. This one is tricky because it is asking you to look for the NA in a part of the stimulus that you’re not used to looking for it.

[Admin edit: Replaced with link to question. Please don't post copyrighted material, thanks!]

So, I've done this question many many times. And I've never felt great about it. Can some run it down for me?

Specifically, answer choice A.

Here's what A looks like:

A:

Writer has right ---> Author granted writer the right

I believe A is incorrect because "Writer has right" should not be in the sufficient condition.

Rather, to be correct, A should look like this:

Author granted writer the right ---> Writer has right

Is this accurate?

(if you want to add anything else helpful, it'd be greatly appreciated).

Hi Guys,

I don't really know how to address overconfidence errors. So far, I have been taking my PT's and BRing just the questions I circled, and then BRing the rest of the section. However, it has come to my attention that it is more important to BR the questions that you circled first and then address overconfidence errors.

My question is this: what do you do to address the overconfidence errors? Do you look at your test booklet and see the question you circled and try to see what your reasoning was? What if you don't remember it? I took a PT on Friday and am now reviewing the test bc I was busy yesterday. Do you just try to reason why the one you chose is wrong and all the other answer choices? Or do you look at the answer and then rationalize why that is correct and the others are incorrect.

I'm really confused about the process for the overconfidence errors and would be most appreciative of any insights or help someone can provide me.