Hi :)
As the title suggests, I am struggling with this question type quite a bit. Do you guys have any strategies or tips on how to improve on this? Almost every point I lose on RC is exclusively this type, and I'm not quite sure what I should change in my reading or process to avoid this mistake.
Thank you, I hope you're all doing well! We got this <3
@BrooklynHope hope I'm not too late, but I think this is one of those spots where the LSAT expects you to make a reasonable assumption about the state of the world and just roll with it. The idea is that "uncomfortable" and "comfortable" are a dichotomy. Meaning, you can't really have something that is neither comfortable or uncomfortable. You might protest and say that there absolutely exists a middle ground of just "fortable" things, but in this question, the LSAT wants you to use the notions of "comfortable/uncomfortable" as opposite ideas that you can negate and therefore take the contrapositive of.
One thing that helps me is to keep in mind the question type. Being a "Must be True" question, you know you are going to be dealing with formal logic, so its probably safe to assume that two opposite-sounding ideas are meant to be used in this way. If it was something like a Strengthening question, and the argument was focused on causal logic, then maybe it is less okay to take the ideas of "comfortable" and "uncomfortable" and treat them as opposites.
My only problem with A is the phrase “more plentiful”, which tells you nothing about the baseline number of jobs in the places where people are buying these houses. What if there’s lots of job openings near all the neighbourhoods? Then it wouldn’t really matter if there are more elsewhere, right?
I get that it’s the “best” answer of the 5, but maybe someone can explain if I am missing something 🙏🏻
I wanted to ask a clarifying question in regard to the Context in the stimulus. Could the context ever contain a premise we would later need for our logic diagrams? I know sometimes the Context might contain an idea that a genuine premise points back to with referential phrasing, but can the Context ever contain a premise in itself?
Are you allowed to take the contra positive of a rule, or not?
For example, if the rule is:
"if there is a rain storm, the hotel must provide umbrellas to its guests"
are you allowed to say that:
"if the hotel is not required to give an umbrella to its guests, it is not raining"
Or do situations like that simply not arise in these question types?
When you have multiple variables in a stimulus, you can have at most one be changing, while the others have to be consistent, or share a consistent relationship, in order to draw out a claim. In other words, you have to be able to isolate the effect you're talking about by ensuring that your other variables are not interfering with your phenomenon.
In this case, the variables are:
energy requirement of bird
Energy given per food unit
Time-to-eat-food
We are told that the energy requirement is the same for both birds. Great, this is a stable relationship. We are also told that nectar gives more energy than seeds do in the same quantity. Cool, this is also a stable relationship, so to speak, and more importantly, it doesn't change.
So now we want to conclude that the seed-birds take more time to eat than the nectar-birds.
But hang on, we haven't actually set the terms of our time-to-eat-food variable yet. It could be the case:
energy requirement is the same
energy given by nectar is more than seeds
the nectar takes so long to eat that the seed-birds catch up to the nectar birds in the same time required to consume same amount of energy units (Loophole)
Hence, (C) calls this out by saying that the nectar-birds don't take longer to eat one food unit than do seed-birds.
You have to have some sensitivity to these mathematical relations, unfortunately, as I don't this question is solvable through word considerations alone. That being said, when you encounter a question dealing with a similar structure in the future, look for the variables in the phenomenon, and make note of the ones explicitly defined or set by the stimulus. The ones that are left ambiguous are open to vulnerabilities, where your strengthening/weakening/NA answer choices will come in.