If one does well on the LSAT, then they studied hard.

However, one has to be alive to take the LSAT.

So if you're feeling discouraged, remember, everyone: even if we fail the sufficient assumption, at least we satisfy the necessary assumption by being alive.

My parallel reasoning example I came up with:

People with antidepressants tend to be correlated with being less happy.

However, antidepressants themselves don't necessarily cause someone to be less happy.

So if we say that if you want to be happy, you should consider not taking antidepressants, that doesn't make sense because antidepressants are correlated with unhappiness but they don't necessarily cause it.

We can undermine that argument by breaking the correlation: Most people who take antidepressants feel happier because they take antidepressants. That completely obliterates the notion that antidepressants are correlated with unhappiness, which in turn obliterates the possibility that antidepressants cause unhappiness.

I initially chose E but now I see that it didn't even talk about the premises. The point of weakening questions is to undermine the support that the premises lend to the conclusion. I now see that AC E should have been a big red flag for me since it didn't even mention the premises.

Recognize correct answer OR process of elimination → Get answer correct

/Get answer correct → /Recognize correct answer AND /process of elimination

If we don't get the answer correct, that means we didn't recognize the correct answer by itself AND we didn't arrive at the correct answer through the process of eliminating the 4 incorrect answers.

I initially chose A but changed it to D right before time ran out, and I'm glad I did. Watching the video helped solidify my understanding of why A is wrong and D is correct. AC A tries to compare a qualitative, subjective thing while AC D compares a quantitative, objective thing. "Older" and "number of rings in a tree" are much more quantifiable than "wiser". The question stem specifically talked about quantifiable things - "higher altitude" and "thinner air".