I’m really sorry to hear that — dips are natural since testing is a moment in time measurement and each PT is different. Your dip just came at a particularly unfortunate time. While wrong questions are still a good learning opportunity, I’d say the biggest thing would be to rebuild some confidence before your test. Maybe do a section or a few challenging (whatever that means for you) drills just to remind yourself of all the work you’ve put into this and that that PT isn’t representative of your full ability
I had (D) and switched to (E) after overthinking whether Lichtenstein was for or against emotion. If I were caught on it again, I'd want to notice that (B), (C), and (E) are all suggesting that he is pro-emotion -- suggesting they can't all be the answer at the same time -- whereas (D) is the only one (incorrectly) suggesting his is anti-emotion
@02kimask That said, in terms of underlying the argument, (A) makes the most sense and is directly tied to some of the text whereas the other options I was considering are pretty unrelated to the text's content
I was thrown off (A) based on the author's concession that
Belize is free to develop its common-law jurisprudence on the doctrine of indigenous rights independently of other jurisdictions and their incorporation of international norms
but I can see how they are just stating that that is their right to ignore what others are doing (while the author favors that they don't ignore precedent).
However, I also found the word "should" in (A) to feel too strong. I felt the last sentence of the passage was saying "I think they'll do x" rather than "They should do x"
Using the same agreed upon relationships:
Plants growing quickly → take in more CO2 than released
Plants growing very slowly → take in less CO2 than released
Substantial increase in amount of CO2 released into atmosphere causes -> temperature increase in tropics causes -> plants in tropics, on average, grow more slowly.
I thought (D) could work based on the second bullet (slow plants -> take less CO2 than released = increase CO2 in atm), which then could link in front of the last chain to create:
slow plants -> increase CO2 in atm -> temp increase in tropics
Two issues I'm now finding with this:
Issue 1: The temp in tropics is never said to increase substantially in the stimulus
Issue 2: We'd need to assume that the CO2 increase from plants growing slowly could be "substantial." I thought maybe the accumulation of many plants growing slowly and/or over time could become substantial, but these criteria may or may not be met
@calliekoskovich You may already have your answer but yeah you're correct -- we'll have physical scratch paper and the highlighting/underlining tools but not annotating tools
@sserota I had thought so too. We need to pay special attention to what the conclusion is: The snakes caused increase of spiders.
The parts about the birds provide support to that conclusion by providing a mechanism.
Since we're trying to strengthen the conclusion, we can
1) strengthen the given mechanism that you mentioned (you and I both tried to do this, but in this case, none of the answer choices fit)
2) add an additional mechanism to support the conclusion, which is what (A) does
Stimulus:
snake -> fewer birds -> more spiders (bc fewer hunted and housing untouched)
In the answers, I looked for something that would corroborate the given mechanism, forgetting that a strengthener can provide an alternative piece of support.
I had chosen (C), as I had thought that it corroborates the stimulus's claim that spider's webs are less frequently disturbed, but I now see that it's just further support for something that we already know about Guam: it has more spiders. Since the biologist's conclusion is about the mechanism, further agreement about the outcome is not helpful.
I immediately dismissed (A) for the reason others have mentioned: I imagined the station spamming "rain time!" in their predictions to the point of being like the boy who cried wolf.
But I can see how combined with the statistic (>50% accurate), it confirms that even if they were obnoxious about the rain, they're still right more days than the other stations.
@Annie1234 This passage isn't the proposal. The word "proposal" in (C) refers to Harraway's book (ie, her book is the proposal)
Originally discarded (A) bc I thought it was eliminating other possible causes (ie, other types of radiation). But the conclusion only mentions the ozone later, not the type of radiation. Note to self: heed conclusion carefully
Originally selected (D) bc it sounded out of pocket, but it was eliminating alternative explanations (which, sadly enough, I thought (A) was doing)
When I read the stimulus, the bridge I thought I'd be looking for was a panopticon type of thing, where just the chance (even if small) of getting caught by an antitheft device would deter thefts.
(C) seemed to offer that option: if pre-device, thieves knew they probably wouldn't get caught, they could do their thing. But with the new device, their odds of getting caught have increased if they happen to choose the wrong car (one with a device) -- fear of getting caught could be a strong deterrent that didn't previously exist.
But I guess (E) is more direct, and (C) requires too many assumptions
I got this wrong, but on review, I can see that a strong understanding of the stimulus and a shallow pass should suffice for this question.
Stimulus: There are two hypotheses, and one gets rejected bc its expectations (that females and child dolphins partake) is not met
So on a shallow pass of the answers, we can look for two hypotheses (none of the answers have this) or a rejection of a hypothesis.
All of the answers except D accept the author's hypothesis, so the best match is D
When my internet cuts out momentarily and is working to reconnect, the timer continues to count down despite the rest of the page being unusable (so I can't pause the timer manually). Is possible to program the timer to pause automatically when there are connection issues that interfere with the rest of the page?
Thank you for all your hard work!!
I went through a similar sudden dip, and I just want to encourage you to trust yourself and your hard work! A dip like that can be a huge demotivator/destabilizer, so I want to reassure you that all your hours of studying are valuable and are still in that noggin of yours.
Maybe try taking a few days away from PT151, do some other studying, and I like the other commentor's suggestion of rubber ducky-ing it when you come back to it.
Don't let this little practice test shake you. Learn from it, grow from it, and trust yourself. Good luck in June!
Many schools (including T6) have Older Wiser Law Students (OWLS) clubs for students 30+/with more life experience -- and someone's gotta be in the club:) maybe you can find contact info for a club at a school your interested in to see if any of the students would be willing to chat about their experience!
@bappel From my understanding, (E) is saying:
Old survey: animals
New survey: animals + plants
I interpreted "inventory" to be a "count/assessment" rather an appendix, but even if it's an appendix, it is part of the total of the survey, which counts all wildlife.
Keep in mind that "wildlife" as a term includes both plants and animals. So if the new survey counts plants, the plants are not viewed separately from animals since the metric is "wildlife" in total.
Then, we can see that the metric of "wildlife" has changed to be more inclusive/generous, so then it's possible to explain the increase in survey results as due to the survey being more generous in its def of wildlife than due to an actual growth in wildlife.
I understand (E), but I'm not convinced (C) is wrong.
I interpreted (C) as:
assumes that because a certain action [criminal action] has a certain result [violating the law] the person taking that action intended that result
The stimulus assumes that criminals have poor personal ethics. But what if they violated a law that they didn't know about? Then it's harder to connect the crime to poor personal ethics. We might attribute their actions to ignorance instead. If we do this, the stimulus's assumption that crime -> poor ethics falls apart.
@SimonArmendariz Gah! Thank you for distilling it! That makes total sense!
I understand how (A) breaks the positive correlation (@kwangleestuff519 wrote a nice explanation of it), but I'm still not 100% on (C).
I guess my question is, if we know there's a positive correlation only for one subset (hereditarily predisposed + drinks caffeine), can we conclude there's a positive correlation for the entire superset (everyone who drinks caffeine)?
Or maybe I'm misunderstanding (C) entirely?
I struggled to identify what a "noneconomic constraint" was, as the negation in "no noneconomic constraints impinge upon the economy" confused me.
But now I see that:
Neoclassists purport that noneconomic constraints don't exist/don't affect the economy -- ie, the economy is an independent bubble
Steady-staters believe that the economy is not an independent bubble. Rather, the environment plays a role. What is an example of a "noneconomic constraint" affecting the economy due to the env's role? Waste absorption. Yippee
Altho I understood the meaning of "underscore the fervor," it didn't lend itself easily to my understanding of "mystique" (mysterious).
So I just used process of elimination:
(B) - eliminate bc no discussion of empirical (data-based) research
(C) - I deliberated on this one for a while, but it didn't sit well with me. I think bc (C) implies that the author is expressing appreciation for ecosystems, but the author is really just describing the theorists
(D) - eliminate bc the reformers' ideas are not described as particularly theoretical or hard to understand
(E) - eliminate bc we don't know how widespread the support is, just that it exists
And then (A) - yeah, keep, I guess. It made more sense in the context of the sentence/passage than (C). (A) also aligns with the strength of the words "taboo" and "adored"
@SavanaTipton I was quite stuck between A and C too! There was my internal debate in two parts:
Part 1 - example vs analogy
Example is just one instance of something.
Analogy requires a comparison between two parts. At first I thought to myself, "Oh, there are two parts here," but I think that in analogies, it's often two parallel examples (specific instances) and then drawing a conclusion from one example to determine the conclusion from the other example.
Part 2 - principle vs conclusion
My understanding of the diff bw principle and conclusion might be less than accurate, but the general idea in my head is that "principles are general, abstract ideas," not specific instances. Whereas, I think conclusions can be about more specific instances.
Lastly, we know what (A: general principle + example) looks like from the stimulus. Based on what I wrote above, here's a bad example of what (C: analogy + conclusion) could be:
Customer A who can choose between 50 varieties of cola is less free than Customer B who has only these 5 choices: wine, coffee, apple juice, milk, and water.
Similarly, Student A who can choose between 10 different math classes is less free than Student B who can choose between algebra, history, and sculpture. general principle by means of an example. [Second specific example]
Since we can clearly see that Student A is less free than Student B, we can see that Customer A is less free than Customer B. [Specific conclusion, not general principle]
I hope some of that rambling makes sense.. Thank you for asking the question -- I, at least, feel better about this question having had the chance to write out my thinking!
Thank you for this thoughtful post!! Good luck to you too!!!