@shellsea Exactly. This may be the worst LSAT question of all time. These early PTs really are something

@Mam14ay My thought was that 'contemporary societies' was too vague. Maybe that includes government but, like your thinking, couldn't this also include aristocracies/religions? This is the final question type I'm struggling on but I keep running into these situations were I'm finding holes in the correct answers so I eliminate them. Very frustrating.

A does not make sense to me. This seems like a sufficient assumption but it seems too strong to be a necessary assumption. What if the public's opinion will lead to physical harm? Should it then be enacted? Changing this art won't reasonably lead to any physical harm so Hector makes no mention of this consideration. But since he does not take this into consideration we can't say this statement is necessary. The 'no matter what' in this AC opens it up to any possible situation. What am I missing here?

E makes me sad. I chose it because I thought, when it said 'courses' the second time, that it was referring to courses in general, from any subject. My reasoning was that perhaps there are other subjects in which stats and dates wouldn't be so boring. With this interpretation, the AC is not necessary.

I just can't seem to get these 5 star NA questions right. There's often something that I'm uncertain about in an AC whichs leds me to an incorrect AC

@DavidLaid Thanks!!

This is a crazy question under timed conditions. I feel like parallel flaw questions sometimes punish you for treating them like parallel reasoning questions, so that makes me hesistant on choosing B just because of it's similar structure. A has a flaw that is quite similar to the stimulus. I feel like it is close enought to be a correct AC if B wasn't there.

Kevin's explanation nails the error I made in this question. I conflated 'increasing food production' with 'agricultural advances' and thought that the sentence in question was starting off a causal chain that would end up supporting Malthus' conclusion.

@HollyShulman I recognize that the purpose of the analogy is to show that too many warnings result in warnings not being taken seriously enough. But isn't this idea reflected in the difference between publicizing initial & definitive study results?

The argument says that we get too many warnings from initial studies (A fire alarm is a warning). And that to get people to pay more attention to health warnings, only conclusive results should be published. Why though? The author does not outright state this, but given 'we are constantly bombarded by warnings' from initial studies, it's implied that people get desensitized by these warnings. The analogy is then provided to confirm this implication. Just like how people become desensitized to the fire alarm (a warning) due to fire drills, they become desensitized to health warnings from initial studies.

To me, this is how the analogy clarifies the distinction between initial study and definitive study. The argument never really clarifies what's different between initial & definitive studies. The fire drill/initial study both desensitize people to their respective warnings. So when there's an actual fire/definitive study, there is potential harm from people not taking it seriously.

Language is too strong for this be the correct AC. There's a difference between something being 'inappropriately high' and another being able to better 'determine appropriate levels of damage'. If the stem said something like 'would most likely believe' that would have made this a more acceptable AC. But it just says they 'believe that'. We can't say this for sure given how strongly worded the language is.

WTFFF. Someone please explain to me why D must be true. Why can't it be true that most mail that is correctly addressed is damaged in transit? We have no info about how much mail is damaged in transit or how much of it is incorrectly addressed. To me, the same reason why A is wrong is why D is wrong

@spencerh98 Preach

This passage is nuts! It has three 180 curvebreaker questions. I only got 1 of them right. I had no idea how to approach this question. I don't think I've ever seen a question like this and had no idea what they were looking for by an 'appropriate response'? I chose D because it would have been what best represented passage A's interests which would seem appropriate to them.

I am not a fan of this one. 'D' starts off sounding really good, having no proof of something is exactly what faith is. But the 'prescriptivists' efforts have no effect on the evolution of language' part sounded far too strong. Funny that I eliminated the correct answer for being too strong and chose a wrong answer that was also too strong.

In 'D' the author concedes 2 sentences before this phrase that 'many attempts to regulate language have failed' so that sounds like some evidence to me. And what about the perscriptivists efforts? This part of the passage is referring to the descriptivists denying that some perscriptivists efforts invalidate the scientific objection. This is a very narrow and specific effort from the perscriptivists. To say that from this, none of their efforts have had any effect on the evolution of language is flawed reasoning.

However, the question is asking us about the author's intent on using this phrase. While it may be true that this claim is too strong, it doesn't mean the author didn't use the phrase in that manner.

Lesson: Focus on author's intent. This isn't an MBT or flaw question. RC is something else.

@yangevan3 Ahh thanks, this makes sense. It's good to keep the task at hand in mind and repeat what needs to be weakened

@sparillo19 This was a very strange question and I considered B, C, & E. The main reason I chose E was that the saying at the end clearly didn't make sense. For B, I agree you with here, there's a disconnect between their surprise and his history of having 'left his wallet'. But the saying at the end makes sense as commentary on his behavior as it follows the sentence about him 'having done the same thing before'

Yeah this is wack. This passage does not indicate that seminomadic societies are simplistic. In paragraph 2 it even mentions the aspects of the !Kung that result in westerners' "received attitudes about 'simple' societies". Those aspects are not about seminomadism so we can't make the connection between seminomadism and simple societies as this question illicitly requires.

This was the only question I got wrong on this section because, like many here, I did not think intent was necessary for fraud. Funny for this to be a thing on LSAT because one would imagine that learning what is considered to be fraud would be something you learn in law school. It sounds like the subject of what I imagine a question on the bar exam would be.

The LSAT usually does a good job of providing all the info you need to know in the stimulus but I feel this question does demand a pre-existing conception of what constitutes fraud.

This question is interesting alongside PT149.S4.Q18. In that question, the necessary assumption requires you to know that belief is required for the intention to mislead. So taken from these 2 questions: Fraud→Intent→Belief. I think the link between Intent & Belief makes intuitive sense but Fraud→Intent is something that should be established in the stimulus.

If anyone knows any other questions that deal with intentions and what they imply/require I'd love to review them.

I chose D because it sucks. It does barely anything to resolve the paradox. We have to assume Charlesville residents are used to warmer temps. Then we have to assume that their keeping homes more than 10 degrees warmer on avg than those in Taychester. And 10 degrees is a large number in terms of home temperature in farenheight and an even larger number in celsius. However, B definitely is the right answer because there's no assumptions that can be made that would allow it to resolve the paradox.

Why is B necessary? If only some nations are required to give up industry then it still can be true that most nations would abide by the law. I do see now that the negation of B destroys the argument, but as the argument stands I cannot agree that it is necessary. The existance of 'some' and 'most' are not mutually exclusive

Last Reviewed

This question is interesting because it features south a simple statement: A→B→C | TF A→C

But the wording of the ACs make it hard to decipher how to put these relationships into a conditional statement. What we should really be looking for to speed things up is a conclusion that gives us A→C. If we see other things we can eliminate

I try not to diagram parallel flaw questions like I do parallel reasoning because the same flaw can occur with different terms. But for this one I had to diagram because the ACs seemed close to me.

As explained, E's major flaw is that it's conclusion is unrelated. But wouldn't it also be making a percentage vs amount flaw? It seems that's the reasoning they have for making the unrelated conclusion.

If I'm not mistaken about E also making a precentage vs absolute flaw, would it be correct to say that for parallel flaw questions we should eliminate an AC if it has a more glaring flaw than the one in the stimmy?

Nahhh. 'E' is not a necessary assumption. It could be the rocks melted as they burned up plummeting through the atmosphere. Then it would not be the impact causing them to melt but they would still crystalize at the same time as if they melted due to the impact. I chose this over 'A' because there's no point in making this argument if 'A' is not true. If the crater wasn't of a size to cause a mass extinction then that's your argument. Not this.

This was a rough question for me. I was between 'B' and 'D'. I felt both were not proven. Author doesn't say that any breakthroughs weren't possible due to computers. But they do mention something that it 'dramatically illustrates'. For 'D' I didn't understand that proving theorems was an application. I was looking at the example of clouds as an application, but that hasn't happened yet so I thought there was no evidence of applications for fractals. So answering this right really depends on knowing what a mathmatical application & a theorem are, because neither are explained in the passage.

The actually useful takeaway from me is that it's better to select an AC that I'm confused about rather than one that I'm pretty sure has no evidence.

@NewStudent Thanks for this explanation as it makes a lot more sense that just saying "well the benefit is from grapes so why would it be from other fruit?" There is nothing in the passage to suggest other fruits don't have this compound. But the seems to think that.

I'm going to try and take this advice into consideration when doing Author Perspective questions in the future because I'm constantly getting them wrong.

@HollyShulman This question (and this section as a whole) is HARD. I eliminated A because, like many, I thought that it was wrong because she never said that assertiveness, combat, and display were detrimental to future progess. Worst part is, I thought I was clever for avoiding the trap. 'A' is nefarious as it's a correct answer choice disguised as a trap.

Thank you for pointing out the disconnect between these traits individually and 'social conditions', which is more of a collective of these traits. It's the collective of these traits that are now detrimental to evolution rather than the individual traits themselves.