Another reason we can eliminate D is because it is baiting you to think this drawback wrecks our conclusion by suggesting that thick walled homes were better for AC. So what? Thick walled homes could have very well been better at containing AC air. But we don't need that to be false for our conclusion to stand. Our stim is simply arguing that thin walled homes "generally sold well". They could have sold well despite not containing the AC air as well as thick walled homes.

A hinges on the implication that if these two objects are only found within a small radius, that means they are pretty much both found in the same place. In the place we see white glass, we also see purple Han and vice versa. Then you must push this inference farther to say that if these things were found in a very large radius, say, scattered throughout China, theres a chance that the glass and the purple Han were not found together. If A would have said that fragments of both were found near one another, it would have been such an obvious correct AC, because if they were not found near one another, it really weakens our argument.

All the advice above is so great. This isn't directly answering your question, but maybe something that can help you avoid that situation altogether...focus on process. When I am in this position, it's usually because I read a rule wrong or missed something in the stimulus. As a result, I've been SO strict with myself when it comes to LG process. I double check all the rules and make sure I understood them correctly (ex. reading L and R go together instead of L and R cannot go together). Then when I make gameboards if I'm splitting, I try to do a quick double check against the rules to make sure everything looks correct.

So here is the lawgic for the premises in the stim:

P1: all organic-->/enough food

implicit P2: enough food

-----

/organic farming increase

As JY explains in the video, the author should have concluded /all organic. But they didnt. they concluded that there cant be in increase in organic farming. This idea is not the same as "all organic". So this argument is basically saying:

a-->/b

b

-------

/c

what?! bad argument.

There isn't anything unusual going on with the negations/contrapositives here. There is a difference between taking a contrapositive of a statement and negating an entire statement, though. If you want to negate a-->b, you're saying it is not the case that a-->b, so we write this out as a&/b, "it is possible to be an a and not be a b". But if you're taking the contrapositive of a-->b, its /b-->/a. Similarly, if you just want to negate an idea, "b", for example, you can negate b (/b) which triggers /a.

Hmm..I'm not sure if I get your question but let me try:

Not all people eat apples, or, NOT (all people eat apples). How do we negate an all statement? Some....not... So this translates to Some people do not eat apples

All people do not eat apples. This is a conditional statement. people-->/eat apples.

The stimulus is making a some/all error. If I say all farmers farm organically, then it is also true some farm organically. But if I say some farm organically, it does not follow that all farmers farm organically. (The core curriculum talks about all these concepts in the existential qualifiers section)

Also, when I read conditionality in a head, I say, "if you're an a, you're also a b. if you're not a b, you're not an a".

I hope one of those comments got at the thing you were confused about!

This AC combined with D is such a mindfuck. Oof. Rewording it like this helped me: "it fails to consider that not being able to feed the world --which would certainly happen if all farmers started farming organically--would still certainly happen even if just some went organic."

Our author is saying: if all farmers went organic, there wouldn't be enough food to feed the world. So if we want to feed the world, we can't have any more farmers start farming organically. Why? Because I, the author, believe that if just a few more farmers, not even all of them, start farming organically, we won't be able to feed the world.

Do you see how the author is explicitly making an assumption (bolded above), rather than overlooking it? The author is stating a premise: ALL farmers organic-->/feed world and then makes an assumption that some =all when they conclude: Some farmers organic-->/feed world. They don't fail to consider this possibility that some farmers can cause us to starve, their argument on it.

Hi! My score dipped a bit a few weeks ago when I dove into the 80s, since test week was getting closer. I don't think the 80s are "harder"-- everyone has different strengths and weaknesses when it comes to the test. But they are different from the 50s and 60s. Particularly, I find the language is less straightforward. So just try to familiarize yourself with the rhythm and the subtleties of this as much as possible before test day. And be sure to end your studying on a positive note so that you're walking into test day in the best possible headspace. You've got this!

E: this is telling us that ok, the stim gave us two consequences of driving w a passenger that are beneficial, but let me address another thing that could happen when you're driving with someone: they keep talking. In that scenario, talking on the phone is the same level of dangerousness or less dangerous than the situation when a person keeps blabbing. So even if the two things outlined in the stim don't happen, and this third thing happens-- they continue to speak-- AC E is telling us that there's really no difference in danger between that and talking on a cell phone; if anything, talking on a cell phone could be less dangerous. This is putting the cellphone talking and passenger in the car on the same level of dangerousness. But we need the cell phone to win! So this AC doesnt do anything. When you consider the negated version-- talking on the phone is MORE dangerous than talking in the car to someone who keeps speaking-- our argument is strengthened...but negating should destroy the argument. So this isn't an NA.

A: the stim is comparing talking to someone on the phone (1) or talking to someone in the car (2). 1 is more dangerous because they cant be quiet or give helpful tips. In situation 2, they can be quiet or give tips. A is telling us the only time speaking to a driver can help us out is when they're giving helpful tips. And what do we know about talking on the cell phone? that person cannot provide helpful tips. So they cant be helpful. So it must be that talking on the phone is the more dangerous type of talking out of the two scenarios. Negated, A clearly wrecks the argument: talking to a driver in a difficult situation does not increase the dangerousness, EVEN IF the person driving is not providing helpful warnings. This tells us that the people on the cell phone who arent giving helpful warnings dont increase the dangerousness of the situation, wrecking our argument.

I'm not quite sure if I understand your question.... so the NA here is allowing us to say that: you're less likely to get something built if you're doing it in a way that equally and widely spreads out power, AKA, a referendum. So if you use a referendum, you're less likely to get your thing built and therefore, not getting that thing built diminishes the welfare of the society.

Ok, great. But in order for me to tell you that not doing a thing will diminish society's welfare means that if the thing was built, it would have at least slightly enhanced society's welfare. If building a thing NEVER increased welfare, then how would the failure to build it diminish something that never existed in the first place?

Not sure if that addressed your confusion; hope its helpful!

many = some, maybe thats what you were thinking of

YES this is so helpful thank you!

I think you can totally get this question right without lawgic.

Even though this is a MBT question, this question is just begging us to fill in the conclusion at the end of the stimulus. The author starts by laying out this conditional statement(s). Then they say, "BUT CLEARLY, X". Without even knowing what X is, its obvious to see that the author is setting up a counterargument with this example. So I'm thinking already that I'm looking for something that tells us the conditional statement at the beginning is NOT THE CASE.

If we flesh out X, its saying that some people don't know the definitions of the words they utter. The missing implication or unstated assumption that would logically complete the argument is "...but they understand the word." The last sentence is implying that our conditional statement is not the case, that you can both understand a word and not know the dictionary definition. That is why E just intuitively works.

When I went back to A, I felt like it had to be true. But A is only true if we accept the conditional statement at the beginning. If that conditional statement is not the case, then A does not have to be true.

"People" does not necessarily mean all people, or every single person. It is general and vague on purpose, and I think it can be interpreted as "some people" as easily "there exists people who...". Even so, all the people in the study could have very well been influenced, since the other 50 in the experiment were also given a suggestion, they were asked about the musical piece they just heard and the other half were asked about a film, so both groups were prompted.

I missed "large" cooperative groups and I didn't like B because I felt like we had to assume there were large numbers present. Carefully read the stim... sigh.

Also thought this was blocking an alternate possibility. But as someone else below pointed out, its also showing that there is cause, no effect, which weakens. At any rate, we shouldn't be using either of these methods to weaken a probable causal argument.

I think the content sort of makes this tricky, because the stimulus isn't just saying the environmental variation is the thing that led to the fall of Rome. It's saying that the environmental variation led to a problem with food which led to problems with ruling, AKA it potentially did lead to unrest, which caused the ultimate fall. So the unrest wasn't necessarily the trigger that began the decline, but it very well could have been a product of environmental variation as well as a cause of the fall. @ Justin Case I think the idea youre getting at, that if this AC suggested unrest was not the primary causal factor that got the decline rolling, it would doing a much better job of being an alternate blocking AC. But there's still the issue with the probability.

I didn't pick D because so often I feel like reversals aren't correct because they make bad inferences. But the ways to strengthen a probable cause question are: 1. show the reverse is true, 2. Show that there is not some third cause that is responsible for both cause and effect, and 3. data error. D fits the reversal perfectly.

lol i feel like this is a good example of one of those questions i would have gotten right in 20 seconds prior to studying for the LSAT, but now overthink because of everything we've learned.

The negation of some is none. So for D the negation would be: NO conditions that are treated effectively by medicines (aka the cases of HBP we're talking about in the first sentence) are not also treatable through the reduction of stress. Double negatives are tough... So this is saying that all of these cases of HBP which we can treat with medicine can also be treated by reducing stress. From your explanation, it seems like you're on board up to there.

The fact that these cases can also be treated by reducing stress doesn't do anything to wreck our argument, that some cases of HBP must not be caused by stress. All C does is affirm our necessary condition. It looks like maybe you're conflating [not caused by stress with] [not treated with reduction of stress]? The treatment issue is exactly where the gap in this question lies. We're assuming that this medicine we're using for HBP does not function reduce stress. Because if it does function to reduce stress, then we're affirming our necessary condition (Trs in JY diagram), which gets us nowhere-- it could very well be, then, that if the medicine does reduce stress that these cases are caused by stress-- we have no way of knowing.

We're not trying to find the opposite of not getting treated with the reduction of stress, because we dont know whether these patients are, in fact, being treated with medicine that reduces stress. I hope that helps!

C is tricky."If you have an abstract knowledge of science, you are just as good or worse at evaluating practical science based arguments than than those who have no abstract knowledge of science (no knowledge of science at all)." Negated, it says if you have abstract knowledge you're better than those who have no knowledge. This is attractive bc it suggests that abstract knowledge in science actually is helping adults is helping adults in their every day lives at least in some way, and that the skills being taught are useful. This is sort of accounted for in our argument by "very seldom", which acknowledges that sometimes the abstract knowledge can be useful. C is also sketchy because its making a comparison, and we have no reason to think that any comparison to people with no abstract knowledge MUST be true. Maybe this AC could weaken our argument a little bit because it does cast some doubt on the premises. But it doesn't wreck our conclusion in any way.

I think part of what got me on this question was "average commute time for workers in downtown increased". I thought, do they mean workers driving downtown? Or people who work downtown, but who might live in the suburbs and are driving to get there? If it was the latter, I was thinking that there could be backup on the highways OR backup downtown OR backup in a suburb. So I didn't choose E because I didn't think the stim identified the area where the commute time was increasing. I suppose "in" implies that they are currently driving downtown...

The other thing that makes E almost too obvious is that its not really like most RRE questions. Usually, the AC finds some other, unrelated phenomenon or some other factor that is affecting the stim. But congestion, which is mentioned already in the beginning of the stimulus, seems so close a concept to increasing commute time. This question seems so easy looking at it now; wish I could get back in my head as I was taking it to identify where exactly I went wrong.

YES! our criteria for whether a movie review is good is TWO FOLD: it tells you that you're prone to like a movie OR you're prone not to like a movie. If K's reviews are really good at helping people who might not like a movie realize that, then we have no reason to believe S is any better than K.

Vigorous and strenuous are synonymous here. C is wrong because it is the reverse of what it should say. We know that modest exercise can dramatically improve heart health. Walking half an hour most days/week can give you heart benefits. Doing even more exercise (strenuous exercise) is even more effective than walking.

C says if you walk half an hour most days, you can gain the same amount of benefits or even more benefits than strenuous exercise. This isnt right. It should say if you do strenuous activity, you gain at least as great an improvement as walking would give. hope that helps!

Tricky question. I went through this so fast, wrongly choosing B because I thought the flaw was that the author rejected the air traffic control tapes simply on the basis that they are partial (which is a flaw at play, but not the one the ACs go for). I barely paid attention to the rest of the stim, which compared that evidence to the pilot reports, which are said to be more reliable because they are thorough. I think this is really tricky because the bias isn't readily apparent. We're talking about self reporting whether a flight goes off course while landing, which seems pretty objective to me. Why would a pilot give inaccurate info about whether they went off course? This made the flaw harder to see, at least for me. (for example, if it was something more like doctors reporting whether they are cordial to their patients, well yeah that's very subjective and people tend to think they're good and nice) But even if pilots are self reporting their landing data, its possible they don't even realize they're going off course. So they're not intentionally trying to give biased data.

Then the AC's are tricky.

With B, I didn't think that veering off course necessarily meant a pilot "made a mistake". What if wind steered the plane off course?

E is worse, though, because of "accurate information"-- maybe its accurate but just not reliable because its partial. And the fact it says "specific flights" is just so irrelevant. This is an example of me reading D and interpreting it to say what I want it to say instead of what it actually means.

I thought 21 was pretty tough. It says in line 17 that SB identified the tokens as these precursors to abstract written word in her book. And I thought that sort of strongly implied that even though she wasn't the first to discover the tokens (others discovered them and thought they were game pieces or whatever), she was the first to assign the proper meaning to them. So with that, I thought D would have been wrong if it said "the object was not the subject of scrutiny until SB". But because it said that the specific way it represented meaning--as abstract language--wasn't discussed until SB. But I guess we really have no support for that, still. Scientists could have been discussing the possibility that they were related to written word before SB's groundbreaking study. I totally missed line 10.

For 22, D, the timeline is off. Her observations are of inscriptions on envelopes that are dated before 4000AD. If the timeline was right, I think D is more convincing because how could you theorize that the envelope w/ tokens is a record of something if the people who used them never meant for them to be placed in there? What if it was a really arbitrary thing they were doing, and just needed somewhere to contain all these tokens? But still, the fact that they've found hundreds of these envelopes with tokens in them makes the odds of their placement/inscription being haphazard sort of low.

I got burned in this question because in my prephrase I was thinking of something wrong with SB's prior knowledge, that maybe those inscriptions of later known farm products were also used as inscriptions for food or clothing or something else...maybe the inscriptions denoted two things. I wasn't considering the fact that maybe SB is just wrong and the envelopes/tokens were used for a totally different purpose. Good reminder not to get too hung up on your prephrase.

The thing that really trips me up about this question is the comparative aspect. I understand this is a bridging assumption. And that if we negate E (participants dont have freedom of expression and public forums' effectiveness will be just fine still), it wrecks the idea that you need freedom of expression for public forums to play their role (being an important tool of democracy).

Here's where I'm confused: how that idea the conclusion? The conclusion says you need as much freedom of expression as you did in public squares for the internet to be an important democratic tool. Why do we get to disregard the possibility that there was no freedom of expression in public squares? If that's the case, and those squares functioned effectively for democracy, then we wouldn't need freedom of expression on the internet. Ugh I am SO confused by this... any #help would be awesome, thanks! #help

I struggled with the same thing, and I think @dylan2248 had a great explanation. If AC A was, in fact, saying that several centuries ago, dogs existed somewhere else, too, it would definitely be closer to an NA. I think it would be right if it said that several centuries ago the dogs existed somewhere that was easy to get to from either Peru or W Mexico. But that's not all that AC A could imply.

A could also mean that for several centuries, the dogs were only found in peru and mexico but recently, they've been imported to various countries. A leaves the possibility open that the dogs at one point were indeed isolated to Peru and Mexico, but since then, have been transported to other parts of the world. If this second assumption is the one we assume, then our argument is still totally fine.

No matter how you slice AC E, it wrecks our argument. AC A still leaves us with too many questions for it to be correct.

I was between A and D, probably overthinking. The reason I didn't like D was because I thought that these animals, since they have to at least be somewhat rare before they're declared officially endangered (a totally healthy, non-declining species wouldnt be considered endangered), were already rare and thus desirable for collectors. But I was definitely making a huge assumption with that. And even if the assumption held, you'd think that officially declaring something to be rare would make the desire go up even more. Also, what we need to account for is the fact that this species is declining, then when it is declared endangered and supposed safeguards kick in, it declines EVEN FASTER. D takes this increased rate into account.

A, on the other hand, does not help us. I was attracted to it because I thought that maybe it takes a very long time to list the animal as endangered so that by the time it is officially listed, it's too late to save it. But even if this is what the AC is saying (many years is a red flag), it would be totally compatible with the stim for the rate of species to steadily decline until extinction. Why would there be a rapid decrease all of a sudden? A does not help us explain that at all-- we're still left asking questions.