i think it is subtle bc you need to connect from first sentence. so first sentence says that damaging reputation is possible, and libel is just when what is said is wrong. well last sentence is saying okay so now no one is saying anything bad even if its true, ie no one is having their reputation damaged at all. i think it is common sense, since the conclusion is about "good reputation" that having your reputation damaged is having a worse or bad reputation. so we need a connection between why does no longer any one saying anything bad about someone, cause no one to have a good reputation? well one it is bc no one has a "bad reputation" which causes no one to have a "good reputation" by comparison as "good reputation" is relative likely being the absence of ppl saying anything bad about you.

i think you know this bc the sentence before is about general statement of items on the menu. i think saying food and drink is just another way of saying items on the menu, that the writers are using to trick you.

okay so how i see stimuli like these i really pay attention to when the sentences go back to back ie next sentence picks up where the previous left off. the most statement, which is extremely important to this flaw, needs to pick up where the first all statement left off. ie a to be right needed to say most who have worked for at least a year works in its sales department.

also e is wrong bc it is very strong language. tv could cause ppl to think about what they see, and still do so less often than radio dramas, and the conclusion could still work. "requires" is a very strong word that the stimulus doesnt need, and in necessary assumption, we prefer a weaker answer choice to a stronger answer choice when it comes to wording

i wouldnt say this question necessarily has implicit premises. i would say the premises are explicit and they explicitly match the premises in the correct answer choice. for parallel reasoning, when there are conditionals, an easy way to evaluate ac, besides comparing conclusions, is to count number of parts in conditional and match that to ac. so for this stimulus there were 3 parts of the conditional chain, one premise that was just a stated fact that triggered one of the parts of the premises, and the conclusion which ultimately was not a conditional chain.

this is a sneaky conditional indicator, which is "is a form of." in a stimulus with a lot of conditionals look out for "are/is" bc they can definitely be conditional indicators

Additionally, I think the reason D was probably attractive is bc with causal reasoning stimuli, introducing a third item, is a strong and common correct answer choice to weaken a causal conclusion about two items. but this isnt causal.

@kimbo_logic Yes, we do! However, this is a stimulus where the LSAT expects us to know some common logic elements. Cars and pollution together are a common enough idea that we know the pollution from cars doesnt come from the cars exisiting but from them being driven. So then we know through common sense we can make the assumption that that 30% comes from old cars being driven around. But there must be tons of cars that are super old that arent being driven, are those part of the 30%? No! So if practically none of the cars this company buys are even being driven than practically none are contributing to that 30% pollution, and thus how can we say that obviously the pollution will be lowered more when we buy old cars vs redesigning the plant? We cant.

@zunair first congrats!! Second, did that help you with pattern recognition? I’m specifically really trying to understand enough to be able to make patterns, to recognize what I should look at when dissecting difficult questions, and my feeling is, maybe I’m too rigid, but the explanations don’t always focus on the points where my logic took me. Talking it out w someone in office hours was super helpful, but I know there are a bunch of ppl who scored like you who got past the scoring plateau im at without needing that. And my goal truly is a 180, and I want to build the study habits and test taking habits with that goal in mind.

Any pieces of wisdom you have that got you to that place?

super confused how to do this using the psa sufficent is the premise and necessary is the conclusion strategy here. When there's a conditional in conclusion is the part we want to connect/arrive at always the necessary part?

@akikookmt881 In PSA lesson JY talks about how the premise should be the sufficient and conclusion should be the necessary. In your description of the correct answer, which is the correct answer, you have it the opposite way around the part from the premise is in the necessary part. I'm curious as to why this is and how you think about this strategy given by JY?

Okay so question, for necessary assumption is it always true to look at the supporting premises and see if the negation of the necessary makes the assumptions irrelevant to the conclusion? I was always looking at the necessary assumption to see if it made the conclusion irrelevant, but I think that is an incorrect approach?

Were there any indicator words in this stimulus to imply there was a conditional relationship? How to figure out conditionality when seemingly no indicator words?

I am genuinely so confused by this question. I don't really get what to do when the answers seemingly combine a feature of the necessary and sufficient together. So like when it says if and then should be capitalized but the part with the if (in a it was word that is a preposition or conjunction) are on two opposite sides of the conditional relationship, I don't understand how to check my conditional relationship. I get how to take contrapositive, I get when its and or or you do the opposite when getting contrapositive, but I was really stumped, and still am in reviewing, to see how I should've understood diagraming A and B to see if they match my correct diagram from the stimulus.

It made it more confusing by the fact that JY didn't acknowledge this in his explanation and just did a short hand with the diagram.

Please help!!

@PhoebeHopp But in the explanation he said explicitly that when is a sufficient indicator? So was he wrong?

Would A be a correct strengthener AC to this? I had the correct prephrase, namely that just bc selena doesnt have powers why does that mean others don't, but, like in other problems, I have trouble finding it in answer choices bc I am not familiar with the form it comes in, so just assume I have to throw it out.

I thought A was weird, but was closest to my prephrase because its like okay we are saying that to know if something is possible we need to know if Selena is psychic, but then doesn't that assume that we haven't already found someone to have psychic powers?

I actually eliminated B, because I saw it was the opposite of one of the conditional statements, so thought that meant immediately it was a Mistaken Reversal.

Can someone please explain why A doesn't and would never match that prephrase, whether it would be a good strengthener answer, and also whether it is wrong because it is a conditional stimulus and so the correct answer must be conditional and so that is why A also is wrong?

I think I incorrectly chose D (between D and A ) because, on reflection I thought that either part of the stimulus was fair game to weaken. I thought D would weaken the very idea that ppl get hit more at crosswalks than when not there. Maybe that is wrong, and that would be strengthened if drivers are more careful at crosswalks than not at crosswalks. I think my intiital prephrase was actually pretty much answer A, but I've had a problem in the past where I stuck too closely to my prephrase and so didn't evaluate answers that didn't align with my prephrase.

Also, answer A didn't totally match to my prephrase.

I have to remember in a phenomenon-hypothesis question , it is not valid to try to weaken the existence of the phenomenon, I should simply take the phenomenon happening as true. And then only attack the proof, ie hypothesis for why it happened.

@Rena12345 I was deciding between E for a little while longer than I should have. But, then I realized that E is wrong because it never mentions Sympathy and Justice and we NEED that in our correct answer or else what is the sympathy and justice doing in the first half of our sentence? What is its point?

What is a faster way to get the answer in this question type, besides plugging in the information from the stimulus into the remaining answer choices?

Trying to actually learn pattern recognition on these questions, what pattern of reasoning, or pattern of strategy, or pattern of flaw is to be gleamed from this that I should take away to use in other questions, in an abstract way?

@haena Wow, you're a star! Thank you so much for this!

@haena I've been studying for about a year with some breaks in between while working. I think the logging definitions is an interesting idea. How do you end up finding out that pattern? Is it through reading explanations or just deducing that this is a word that will be used in this way again? I think my problem is that while I am reading to understand, my understanding of what a stimulus or reading comprehension passage means is not the understanding I was supposed to take away. For the example of the red admiral butterfly, I broke the stimulus down, and still came away with the, wrong, understanding that they were trying to mimic, or at the very least came away without the correct understanding that the poisonous butterflies were doing something different.

I am just struggling to see what strategy I can use so that I can recognize which understandings they want me to have or how to lessen my urge to misunderstand what a stimulus or passage means.

Can someone please explain the phrase “dramatically from one organism to the next” can accurately be reasoned in this passage? It feels like a classic LSAT wrong answer as the passage mentioned a similarity amongst frogs and nematodes, and also we don’t know if every mammal or other animal would have a different mechanism for polarity.