Student Question:

I am a bit confused because of the explanations given for 14 B & 17 A & 19 C.

Passage B is obviously talking about women’s political influence. Also, because of line 12~16 (The new work took several forms: Articles about men evaluated the role of masculinity in shaping thought and action, and articles about women gave way to explorations of how an imagined domesticity, or separate sphere for women, shaped culture and politics.), it feels like passage B(women’s political influence) should be considered as a subgroup of current trend. I believe that this is also supported by the fact that 14 B is the correct answer of that question.

• Because of the reasons above, passage B, which illustrates women’s political influence, can also be considered as an illustration of a current trend, focus on gender. (women’s political influence → focus on gender → current trend)

• 17 A was dismissed because author of passage A has mixed feeling toward the trend illustrated in passage B (implication: women’s political influence = current trend)

• 19 C was dismissed because the trend is about gender, not women. (implication: women’s political influence = ~current trend)

it seems like these 3 contradict each other..

#2 and #3 contradict each other, and if #1 is correct, I can accept #2 but should deny #3

but if #1 is wrong, i can accept #3 but should deny #2

How should i resolute this?

Tutor Answer:

I would disagree here. Namely, I think just because women's political influence is a topic discussed does not mean that the author is indicating a particular trend in that influence. What specifically is the trend that the author would be endorsing? That women were having more political influence than before? Where does the author say this? All we can conclude is that the articles are focusing more gender relations (such as the way women's domesticity in a certain time period lent itself to cultural and political influence) than on specific historical women.

There is no textual support for the idea of a trend in women's political influence itself. This article is focusing exclusively on historical scholarship. This is reflected perfectly in 19C, which states that passage B "illustrates a current trend in historical scholarship." The "political influence" piece of that answer choice is again referring to the trend of evaluating gender relations (i.e. how gender relates to political influence) rather than individual women.

The author does not endorse this scholarship, in fact, the author says that they, "wonder what we have lost as we turn our attention to gender. I share the suspicion of many of my colleagues that gender obscures as much as it reveals: that in focusing on underlying structures, we overlook the particular ways in which individual women engaged their worlds."

This would in fact lend me to believe that they are skeptical of the trend in historical scholarship, not advocating for it.

Student Question:

can you pls explain how B) is wrong in 17. The author of A never talks about expectations.

Tutor Response:

For question 17, the question stem is specifically asking us what the author of passage B would be most likely to agree with. Passage A, as a whole, is entirely irrelevant. So overall, your contention that "the author of A never talks about expectations" here is simply not relevant to answering this question. We are looking for textual support in passage B alone to support an inference within the answer choice. Let's dive into why A is supported by the text and why B is not supported by the text.

Answer choice A (the correct answer here) states, "Fictional works that were not written to exploit the reading protocol of a particular genre are sometimes borderline cases of that genre."

This is supported by the text in the first paragraph of passage B. The first three sentences in passage B lay the foundation:

One can, if one wants, define genres of fiction as sets of texts sharing certain thematic similarities, but the taxonomic difficulties of such an approach are notorious. The problem of "borderline cases"—especially in science fiction—arises so often that the definition fails to demarcate genres entirely. A more fruitful way to characterize the distinction between genres is to view it as a distinction between reading protocols...

Here, the author of passage B seems to be contrasting different ways of demarcating genres. The first way is through thematic similarities. However, the author seems to think this is problematic. Specifically, the author notes that borderline cases arise from this way of characterizing genres. The next sentence provides a contrast, saying "a more fruitful" way of doing this is through reading protocols. This introduces the idea of borderline cases in general and provides a basis for the assumption that reading protocol might be a way to reduce the frequency of these cases.

Then the author mentions that "the texts most central to a genre are those texts that were clearly written to exploit a particular protocol." This is where we are getting the majority of the support for A. Here, the author is saying that the better a text exploits a specific reading protocol, the better it fits into a genre. What is the opposite of that? Well that would be books that do NOT exploit a certain reading protocol. And what is the opposite of something central to a genre? Something on the borderline. This is how answer choice A fits in. Is this an assumption? Yes. But it does have explicit textual evidence in passage B.

Answer choice B, on the other hand, brings up a topic that passage B does not even speak to at all. The author never mentions "readers expectations." Just because the author does not mention it, however, does not mean that she does not think it is important. There could be a litany of things this author believes are important that she isn't bringing up simply because she is focusing on another topic right now.

This phenomenon is almost analogous to hearing a parent compliment one of their kids. If a father tells one sibling (who just got an A on a test he studied for really hard), "wow! you are so hardworking!" does this mean this father does not think the other siblings are hardworking simply because he did not say it to them as well? No! The father here is just acknowledging one particular achievement. The author could believe reading expectations ARE essential. We cannot conclude that she does not simply because she does not mention it.

Student Question:

Can you please further explain the connection between the statement in question and the intermediate conclusion?

Tutor Answer:

A subconclusion is a conclusion (meaning that there is a premise, or reasoning, to support it) that is also acting as a premise (reasoning) for another conclusion. To identify premise/conclusion relationships, I like to use the "why? because..." test. A premise, by definition, needs to provide support for the conclusion. So when trying to identify the conclusion versus the premise, I read the sentence and ask myself "Why is that the case?" If I can find another sentence in the conclusion that provides the answer to that question, or the "because..." then I know I have found a premise/conclusion relationship.

We have two statements:

"Many local businesses depend on our region's natural beauty"

"The heavy industrial activity of coal mining would force most of [the local businesses] to close."

Let's start with the first premise. Why do many local businesses depend on our region's natural beauty? Do we have any indication at all why the economy is structured in the way that it is? Is this a tourist economy that thrives on a lot of people coming to visit, so the local businesses need natural attractions to help bring people to the town? Is this a skiing village that relies on the sweeping, beautiful mountains to bring in skiers? We have no idea. The stimulus has offered no evidence to this effect, and this is why it is not a conclusion. Certainly the fact that heavy industrial activity would force the businesses to close would not provide a reason to explain the structure of the economy.

What about the second sentence? Why is it the case that "the heavy industrial activity of coal mining would force most of the local businesses to close?" Well, if we know that a lot of the local businesses need the beautiful natural views to support their success, I think it is pretty easy to say that "heavy industrial activity" might impede that. Picture a beautiful mountain view but right smack in the middle there is a bunch of heavy machinery used for mining. This would definitely kill the vibes. We know that these natural views are necessary to the local businesses. Compromising them would significantly impact the businesses' ability to thrive.

Student Question:

I am confused why C is wrong because I don’t take the term ‘tend to’ to be the same as ‘usually’ and maybe that is where I’m going wrong here. My take on the term tend to is that it applies in all cases since it doesn’t indicate otherwise which means that it’s not committing exactly the same flaw.

Tutor Answer:

I do not think "tends to" would apply to all of the set in question. For example, if I say apples tend to be red, that can just mean that while often, maybe most, of the time apples are red, there are also times where apples can be other colors like yellow or green. You would not take this as my saying that every single apple has a tendency toward redness and some just happen to pop out green, rather, the set of apples, as a whole, has the tenancy toward redness. This is the same as the word usually. If I said apples are usually red, you would not take this to believe that green and yellow apples were anomalies that happened to defy the odds and come out a different color. You would know that I was saying that as a group, most of the apples are red.

Both of these words are describing a condition of a group not conditions of the individual members of the group. This is the precise flaw.

@Elijah_Mize I am adding a comment here to add on as we have gotten another student question with this exact mistake:

I would guess that the problem students are having here is that they are diagramming the none statement as a group 4 indicator (and to those students' credit, none is a group 4 indicator!). In this case, however, the word none is not referring to the necessary condition set up in the premise. In other words the condition is setting up:

WHEN [none of the fully qualified candidates for a new position at Arvue Corporation currently works for that company], THEN Aruve should hire the candidate who would be most productive in that position. The brackets in this case

You cannot apply the "none" indicator to the condition of hiring the most productive candidate because it is not setting up a set/subset relationship. Rather, it is specifying the condition that is sufficient to that outcome.

Student Question:

Is there also an unproven vs. untrue flaw? Because it says “there is no reason to think”

Tutor Response:

Yes, I think I would overall agree that this is a flaw. This argument did reference, "a comprehensive review evaluating the medical studies," so I initially felt a little more hesitant to claim that there is no evidence, because this would theoretically involve a lot of literature reviews and studies; however, just because something has consistently been studied without finding a link does not mean that the link does not exist.

For example, think of the appendix! For years and years scientists had not been able to find a use for the appendix, claiming that; therefore, one did not exist. But very recently scientists discovered that it functions to restore the gut microbiome.

Student Question:

I understand why E is correct, and I chose C. But I have a couple of questions.

1. There are so many other LSAT questions that will get you on making a false equivocation between two concepts. For E to be correct we must assume that physical work = physical exercise. What is the takeaway here, when for many other types of questions I will get incorrect if I equivocate two different concepts?

2. Would C be correct if E was not present? I had been told previously that weaken answer choices could have some ambiguity, as long as there was a CHANCE that the answer choice could weaken the argument, even if only slightly introducing doubt.

Tutor Response:

For your first question, I agree it is frustrating to try to parse through which things are false equivalents and which things are okay. I have two main suggestions for this. First, it is important to be cognizant of which question type you are answering. A sufficient assumption question, for example, tends to require a higher degree of specificity in the word choice utilized than a weakening/strengthening question. Second, in question types that are less conditional in nature, the LSAT is more lenient with synonyms. If we know that an employee is engaging in a lot of strenuous manual labor and "physical work" that puts stress on their back, it is relatively synonymous to say that they are engaging in some sort of physical exercise.

For your second question, I think I would agree that C is the second strongest answer choice, so if we truly had no other options other than the remaining four, C would be the answer I would choose. Still, however, I think C is definitively wrong, even if it is attractive. We don't know a lot about answer choice C. First, we do not know that the manual laborers are actually doing the exercise. Further, we do not know to what extent the techniques would actually make a different (enough to offset the discrepancy??). Even further, we do not know that the office workers were actively not encouraged to use techniques lowering the stress on their back. There are a lot of implicit assumptions here.

So overall, I suppose it is the better of the other three options, so if I truly HAD to pick I suppose I would choose it, but I do not necessarily think it would be correct.

Student Question:

Can you explain why C is a better answer choice than A?

Tutor Answer:

I think the support from this comes primarily from the quotation cited from the judge in the 1991 case. The court said: "The fact that Alaskan natives were prevented, by circumstances beyond their control, from exercising a tradition for a given period of time does not mean that it has been lost forever or that it has become any less a 'tradition.'

In the passage, it is easy to miss the area where the author alludes to these "circumstances beyond their control," but this is implied earlier in the paragraph. The author states that "Alaska Natives had made many uses of sea otters before the occupation of the territory by Russia in the late 1700s." We don't necessarily know what happened here, but it seems as though this practice halted as a direct result of the Russian occupation. This is what makes this situation more analogous to answer choice C. In answer choice C, the practice stopped because of uncontrollable external forces. This mirrors what happened in the example we are given. Even if we are not explicitly told that the Russian occupation halted the practice, we can infer from the court's ruling that a tradition occurring outside of recent memory could still count as a tradition if "circumstances beyond [the Alaskan's] control" led to the disestablishment of the practice.

Further, I think A is incorrect because while we are given an explicit exception to the idea of a tradition, we do not know that there is NO time limit whatsoever for something constituting a tradition. We know that, with the amendment of the extenuating circumstances, that a practice from the 1700s COULD still be considered a tradition. Do we know this about traditions from several millenniums ago? I do not think we do. That time frame seems very extreme compared to the precedent we are working with.

Student Question:

I am having a hard time understanding why B is wrong and why C is correct.

Tutor Response:

In sufficient assumption questions, we are looking for an answer choice that guarantees the validity of the conclusion based on the specific argument that we are presented with. We are limited to working within the argument that the author sets up for us.

The argument first proceeds by introducing context. It introduces what a retrospective study is: it makes connections between people and what happened in their past.

Next, we get the actual meat of the argument. The author concludes that retrospective studies "cannot reliably determine the causes of human subjects’ present characteristics." Why is this the case? The argument explicitly says it is "because retrospective studies of human subjects must use the subjects’ reports about their own pasts."

Answer choice C works within this argument by explicitly providing a reason to indicate that these self reports are likely inaccurate. It provides a direct link from the premise offered (that self reporting is endemic to retrospective studies) to the conclusion of unreliability of those studies. This reporting is both unavoidable and often inaccurate. From this, we can conclude that it cannot be consistently trusted (reliable!)

Answer choice B is incorrect because it does not provide this direct link. C says, "A retrospective study cannot reliably determine the causes of human subjects’ present characteristics unless there exist correlations between the present characteristics of the subjects and what happened to those subjects in the past." Do we know if those correlations exist? No. Maybe they do and maybe they do not. The problem is that our argument simply does not give us any insight whatsoever.

In order to guarantee the conclusion using answer choice B, we would have needed a premise that said that "no correlations exist between the present characteristics of the subjects and what happened to those subjects in the past." If it had, then this would have worked. But it did not!

Student Question:

I chose B, and I just need some clarification with the right and wrong answer (B and C). It seems they are almost saying the same but obviously there some difference I am missing.

Tutor Answer:

The only thing place where we are given information about this, in the entire passage, is within the first two sentences. The passage states:

"In April 1990 representatives of the Pico Korea Union of electronics workers in Buchon City, South Korea, traveled to the United States in order to demand just settlement of their claims from the parent company of their employer, who upon the formation of the union had shut down operations without paying the workers."

From this, we know that when the union formed, they stopped operating and didn't pay the workers. We probably can infer, given that these happened at the same time, that the union had something to do with it.

Answer choice B and C are certainly similar, so I can see why you are confused by it! When you are in between answer choices like this, it is a good idea to try to critically examine each of the options. Put them under a microscope and ask, "well is this necessarily true? Am I adding any assumptions here?"

Let's contrast the two:

• Answer choice B says the business shut down because: "the failure to resolve long-standing disputes between the Pico workers and management"

• Answer choice C says: "the creation of a union by the Pico workers"

Right away, I notice that answer choice C is a lower bar. We definitely know throughout reading the passage that the Pico workers did, indeed, form a union.

Do we know that the business and the union were engaging in "long-standing disputes?" There is nothing in the passage to suggest this was a long standing process. In fact, I might even be able to argue that they were not engaging in disputes for a long time because the business shut down "upon formation" of the union, which to me indicates it was a quick process. Secondly, we also do not know that these hypothetical disputes even failed. Maybe they did come to an agreement, but they owed so much money to the union that they went immediately bankrupt.

C just indicates that the creation of the union was a significant factor. Even though we are not given a lot of detail into why that might have been, we are given enough to presume that they were responsible for a portion of the business' demise.

Student Question:

How do we know that the second sentence is supporting the last sentence and not the other way around?

Tutor Response:

In order to find the conclusion, we need to critically understand what the stimulus is telling us to be able to parse through which of the sentences provide support for the other. I like to use the "Why? Because.." test. Here, with each sentence, I ask myself "why is that so?" after reading the sentence. If the sentence is providing support, it is a premise. If it is receiving the support it is the conclusion (or sub-conclusion, if that conclusion is providing support for another conclusion).

Let's use this test for this stimulus:

• Increasingly, businesses use direct mail advertising instead of paying for advertising space in newspapers, in magazines, or on billboards.

Why is that so? We aren't given any information that proves that this trend is happening increasingly. That's how we know that this is just context.

• This practice is annoying and also immoral"

Why is the practice of using direct mail advertising immoral? Well we know from the next sentence that " most direct mail advertisements are thrown out without ever being read, and the paper on which they are printed is "wasted" So the direct mail is just being wasted without even being read? That certainly feels like it could fit into the "annoying and immoral" bucket. We can see that is a premise for the argument. Finally,

• If anyone else wasted this much paper, it would be considered unconscionable.

Why is it unconscionable for other people to waste the same amount as folks as direct mail, specifically? We don't really know. We have only established that direct mail is "annoying and immoral" BECAUSE they are thrown out without even being read. We don't know if the other people in question are meeting those two conditions. We aren't actually given anything to support this claim on its own.

Rather, the author is making a comparison here to show why this practice of direct mail advertising is immoral. They are saying, well, if other people were doing this, we would think it was bad! So this is bad too.

Student Question:

How do I come up with arrows and links in the way JY does? I tried but my links differed.

Tutor Response:

I hope I can help you better understand the process of diagramming conditionals a little better. I would also recommend that you review the conditional and set logic module in the core curriculum. This logic is really important for many questions on the LSAT, and reviewing the core curriculum, as a whole, could be helpful in future MBT and conditional reasoning questions.

There are two main conditional statements here:

"Each of the many people who participated in the town's annual spring cleanup received a community recognition certificate."

and

"at least some spring cleanup participants who are not active in the town's artistic circles"

The word "each" here is indicating that "participated in the town's annual spring cleanup" is a sufficient condition for a certificate, but let's look through what this sentence is saying. We know that every single person who participated received a certificate, 100% of them, without fail, got the certificate. This is how we know it is sufficient -- 100% of the time, when a sufficient condition is activated, we know something about them will always be true (in this case, receiving a certificate!)

Think about if I had said "each cat is a mammal" What do we know here? Well, we know that if an animal is a cat, it will be a mammal every single time. Cat is a subset within the Mammal superset! You can diagram this:

• cat --> mammal

The same applies for our sentence. We know if a person participated in the town's annual spring cleanup, then they received a certificate

• participated --> certificate

The second conditional is not quite as cut and dry because the "some" indicator does not guarantee anything. We only know that there is some overlap between the two groups. That's why it is not only bi-conditional, but it cannot be negated. We know that at least one person who participated in the cleanup is "not active in the town's artistic circles." Thusly, we know that at least one person who is not active in the town's artistic circles participated in the cleanup! The arrow points in both directions in this case.

• participated <-s-> /active-in-artistic-circles

This is like saying: "some cats have black fur"

We know there is an overlap between animals with black fur and cat, but we do not know how many. We also know from this, that some animals with black fur are cats.

This is how we can make the conclusion that SOME people who received a certificate are NOT active in the artistic circle. We know ALL of the participants received a certificate, and at least one of those participants is not active. The "some" overlap includes those participants.

This would be like concluding that some animals with black fur are mammals. We already know that there is an established overlap between mammals and animals with black fur -- the cats with black fur!

Student Question:

Regarding answer choice (B), I regarded this as a potential weakener, ultimately choosing it between (B) and (E) because I didn’t like that (E) had a knowledge element to it—“known not to be”—vs. actual being something are different. Could you explain why introducing another correlation would not make the conclusion less likely?

Tutor Answer:

First, I think the idea of many, while it could potentially indicate a correlation, does not necessarily even do so. How many is many? All we know from that word choice is that some cats who have X also have Z. What if disease Z is actually just a really ubiquitous disease and like 99.9% of cats have it? Can we really say there is a distinct correlation (that one one changes as the other) just from saying that there is overlap? I would be hesitant to do so.

Let's say however that there was, indeed, a correlation (even if I don't necessarily think we can concede this). I understand why it might seem like introducing a correlation could potentially raise suspicion for an alternative answer choice, but essentially, we are just switching out one flawed argument structure for another. I suppose it could be the case that this correlation could occur because Z causes X, but it could also equally be the case that X (potentially still caused by the hypothalamus) caused Z. It could also be the case that the enlarged hypothalamus caused both at the same time, resulting in the correlation. We simply do not know. For weakening questions, we are looking for an answer that actively weakens the argument, not just something that could, alongside a litany of other possibilities, have one potential explanation that weakens the argument.

@KatieAmdahl to follow up on this, I want to point out that always can sometimes indicate a necessary condition, it just does not always do so it is important to understand the underlying logic. For example, the statement "always remember your helmet!" does not indicate a conditional. BUT, if I were to say, for example, I always wear a hat outside, you know if I am outside, I am wearing a hat (a necessary assumption).

Student Question:

I am still confused by the stimulus and NA and wanted to know if my understanding of the argument is correct.

My reasoning is:

The argument wants to say that beauty is not the same as truth. It does so by giving us a hypothetical world where beauty is the same as the truth and then make a contradiction which allows us to conclude therefore beauty is not the truth. The argument first says that if beauty=truth, then the most realistic = most truthful = best. But since in many case most realistic = /best, most truthful = /best. So to show that beauty =/ truth, we need an assumption that beautiful = best, because if most truthful= /best and most beautiful = best, then truthful =/ best, and we conclude that beauty is not the same as truth?

Tutor Response:

I want to clarify a little bit using intuitive language rather than diagramming to just make sure we are on the same page. As you mentioned, the reasoning for the conclusion (that beauty is not the exact same as truth) is because (1) the most realistic art must be the most truthful art (2) and we know it still isn't the best. Therefore, then, the most truthful art is not the best. (Just as you said: realistic = /best, most truthful = /best)

Answer choice A says, well what if the most beautiful artwork ISN'T best artwork? Couldn't it still be the case that there is no difference between beauty and truth? That leaves room for the most realistic (and therefore truthful) artwork to overlap exactly with the most beautiful artwork. In order to draw this conclusion, we must say that the most beautiful is the best.

Student Question:

I’m still confused as to why the answer is D. I put A because I thought the analogy was that comedians’ social norms when taken as a whole function like copyright while chefs’ social norms when taken as a whole function like intellectual property. Both passages stated this so I’m just wondering how are we supposed to know where to look for the relationship in questions like these?

Tutor Response:

In my opinion, one of the most challenging aspects of this question is parsing through the question stem and identifying what it is specifically asking. I think this is the problem you are facing here. This question stem is asking you to identify a relationship between [cooking and ?] that is analogous to the relationship between [comedians and copyright].

So let's start by looking at the relationship between comedians and copyright laws. What do we know? Well, we know that comedians could use it from the sentence, "Copyright is the most relevant body of law... it applies to jokes and comedic routines." But still they DO NOT use it: "copyright infringement lawsuits between rival comedians are all but unheard of." The rest of passage A goes on to explain what they do use instead (social norms), but this is irrelevant to the question.

Now let's see if there is an analogous relationship for chefs. Remember, we are looking for a body of law that they could use but do not.

For intellectual property (Answer choice A), we know, specifically, that chefs CANNOT use intellectual property laws for their recipes. We are told, "recipes are not a form of innovation that is effectively covered by current intellectual property laws" Yes, the passage does specifically state intellectual property laws, but the key point here is that the relationships are not analogous. We do not know if chefs would choose to utilize intellectual property laws over social norms because they are not eligible to use them at all.

Contrast this with trade secrecy laws in answer choice D. In passage B, we are told that "Legal protections are potentially available via trade secrecy laws, but chefs very seldom use them." This is just like comedians and copyright! They are eligible to use them but opt out.

Student Question:

I’m not sure I understand how the last sentence serves as a premise for AC C. A good way for me to verify a conclusion-premise relationship is to ask myself why should i believe that this conclusion is true. For example, The ads were evidently sent out to test their potential to influence popular opinion. Why should I believe that? Because Ebsen's campaign has been spending heavily on follow-up to gauge their effect on recipients (AC C). I can't see how that supports it.

Tutor Answer:

I agree that this is a challenging main conclusion question, and overall, I think your method for testing the premise conclusion relationship is sound.

I think here you just need to dig a little bit more critically in what the fourth and fifth sentences are actually telling you. I would challenge you, if you aren't quite understanding the relationship between sentences, to try and put them into your own words because I disagree that the final sentence does not provide support for the preceding sentence!

Let's break it down:

The first two sentences are providing context here. We are given the general rule that when candidates send out information in the mail, they are typically doing so to try to sway voters one way or another on some issue or for some politician. Ebsen we are told, however, is not sending out mail for this reason. Why? The author provides new information about the mail technique, which is that there is some threshold of how many houses you are sending mail to in order to make any significant difference in the election.

To illustrate this idea, let's say that there are 100 people eligible to vote in this election. Right now, 40 of them are planning to vote for Ebsen and 60 of them are planning to vote for Ebsen's opponent (let's call her Janice). In order for Ebsen to win the election, he would need to sway 11 Janice-voters to vote for him. Let's say however, that he only sent his campaign mail to 5 Janice voters.

This would be kind of strange behavior, right? Even if Ebsen's mail was the most convincing mail in the world, there's still no way he could win by just convincing those 5 people to vote for him.

Now we get to the author's opinion (the main conclusion). Since we know that the mail is not serving it's typical purpose, it must be serving some other purpose, which, the author believes, is "to test [the mail's] potential to influence popular opinion."

Rather than spend money mailing to all Janice-voters, the author hypothesizes that the mail was sent to a smaller sample size to test what messages are most effective. How do we know that's what the mail was for? Because Ebsen is now spending boatloads of money talking to the mail recipients on how effective they thought the message was. Maybe Ebsen's team brought all 5 of those voters in to see if their opinions had changed, what they liked/disliked, and how their overall experience was with the mail.

Rather than sending out the campaign material to all of the voters, Ebsen is testing it to see if it is effective, and then (perhaps -- we do not know this from the stimulus) plans to send out mail he knows is effective in order to have the biggest impact possible. ​

I would argue that this follow-up process Ebsen is engaging in certainly would provide support to the idea that the Ebsen campaign's goal was to test popular opinion. We are explicitly told that they are spending money to follow up and gauge the mail's efficacy.

Student Question:

I’m having a hard time grasping why D is the correct answer.

Tutor Answer:

In this question, we are given the conclusion that "the television program is therefore (conclusion indicator!) biased against the proposed freeway" Why? Because for every one person interviewed who liked the proposal, there were two people interviewed who did not like the proposal. The conclusion is essentially stating that one group (the anti-proposal group) was overrepresented in the news program, making that news program biased against the proposal.

To help you understand this a bit, let's make it more extreme. Let's say that instead of a 2:1 ratio (2 people who were anti-proposal to every 1 person who is pro-proposal) that people overwhelmingly hated the freeway proposal, and 98% of the entire affected group were against it. To make it easy, let's say there are 100 people affected and only 2 of them are pro-proposal.

Now let's keep the same ratio of people being interviewed. Let's say they interviewed 6 total people: 4 were against the proposal, but 2 were still in favor of it (note, in our hypothetical, they are the only two people who even like the freeway proposal!!)

Does this still seem biased against the proposal? I mean, sure, there were more interviewees that were anti-proposal than pro-proposal, but now, despite the pro-proposal folks only representing the opinions of 2% of the total affected group, they are given 33% of the representation in the news program. If anything, in this case, it doesn't seem like that favors the anti-proposal group, it seems like it would favor the pro-proposal group!!

Let me know if you have any follow-up questions! I hope this helps. For more, it could be helpful to review the 7Sage module discussing The Ideal Experiment, which talks about sampling.

Student Question:

I see why D is correct. However, I am still confused as to why C is incorrect. I chose C because it explains that knowing the name of something does not equate to knowing what that thing is.

Tutor Response:

Overall, I disagree with your interpretation of what answer choice C is saying, and I think this is what is tripping you up. Answer choice C says: "The name or expression that is used to identify something cannot provide any information about the nature of the thing that is identified." This is far stronger than saying that not knowing the name of something =/= not knowing what it is. Answer choice C is saying we cannot know anything at all about it!

Take for example, an orange (the most aptly named fruit). We can take a pretty educated guess what color an orange is simply by knowing the name. We are given a helpful hint into the nature of an orange based solely on the name of the fruit.

The author is not claiming that a name can't be helpful in determining what something is. The author is only claiming that knowing that name is not necessary for knowing what that thing is. In order for an answer to be a necessary assumption, it needs to be precise.

For example, if I said:

The bike costs $100. I bought the bike.

It is a necessary assumption that I had $100. While I could have bought the bike if I had $300, it is absolutely not necessary that I have that much. I only need $100.

This is why answers that are too strong do not work for necessary assumption questions.

Student Question:

I thought B was the right answer as “drawn specifically by the mall and who would not have visited the community had that mall not been built” could demonstrate that those going to the mall are only minimally going to the local businesses/other parts of town. I was, however, between B and D, and really tend to be torn between more concrete AC’s and ones that “could” be true. Do you happen to have any advice specific to this Q, and more generally?

Tutor Answer:

To answer the first part of the question, I disagree that answer choice D resolves the disconnect outlined in this argument. In the stimulus, we are told that when a mall is built, it stimulates the local economy (presumably through increased spending/employment/business activity) and that a lot of economic activity occurs in these malls.

Next, however, we are provided with a surprising result. While there IS a lot of economic activity occurring in the mall (people spending money/starting new jobs), the increase in the local economic activity is small.

Answer choice B says that this disconnect is because there are a lot of out-of-towners coming into the town to buy goods who otherwise would NOT be shopping there. This fulfils the first condition (increased economic activity within the mall!) but it still doesn't explain why the local economy is not benefitting in equal measure. I understand your point that these tourists might be uninterested in exploring other businesses, but given the answer choice, they would not have come AT ALL if not for the new mall. All of that money would have otherwise been lost! The town's economy still would be benefitting from these tourists even if they were not shopping in addition to their time at the mall.

Contrast this now with answer choice D. Here, we know that most of the people spending money at the mall would have simply just gone to another store instead within the area. So now, instead of going to the local vintage clothing store, people are going to the Target in the mall. In this example, the local economic activity isn't going up, it is just going elsewhere. That explains the disconnect.

Overall, my advice to you in choosing between two answer choices is be critical both of the answer choice and of any additional assumption you are making in order to make an answer choice correct. Remember, if any part of the AC is wrong, it is wrong! Also, practice is everything. The more you practice, the more you will identify the LSAT's traps!

Student Question:

Can you please further elaborate why C is wrong?

Tutor Answer:

Answer choice C is incorrect because all we have identified here is that this study is flawed. The stimulus says that certain studies have concluded that song-overlapping in birds constitutes aggressive bird behavior, which was tested based on the birds' responses to the overlapping. The problem here, however, is that every single behavior exhibited by the birds in this study could be perceived as aggressive -- even if they are doing nothing, sitting on their branch minding their own business! This seems pretty suspicious to me.

Let's demonstrate this better with an example:

Say I was testing whether or not cats love their owners. In my test, I tracked my cat, Marco's behavior using three categories: "love," "neutral emotion," and "hate." But what if no matter what he did, I just filed every single behavior of his in the "love" category?

• Marco purrs? Love!

• He cuddles me? Love!

• He eats his dinner? Love!

• He takes a nap? Love!

• He hisses at me? Love!

• He bites me? Love!

• He tries to run away multiple times? Love!

Someone reading this study would probably feel pretty skeptical of the study results. Seems like I may have cooked the outcome here.

Does this mean that cats do not love their owner? No! They definitely still could (and, studies far more reliable than my hypothetical indicate they do). All this means is that I have developed a really bad study.

Taking issue with someone's argument does not necessarily mean you disagree with the conclusion outright.

Student Question:

Could you please further explain why A is wrong?

Tutor Answer:

With primary purpose questions, we are not simply trying to find something that happens in the passage, we are looking for an answer choice that describes the author's motivations for writing it altogether.

First, I want to examine what the author might mean by "scientific puzzle." We know that a puzzle is something that is baffling, difficult to solve, or confusing. I am not sure what the word "puzzle" would even refer to here. Is it that the human ability to eat raw food has declined? By its very definition, a puzzle needs to be difficult to solve, but doesn't the author spend the entire rest of the passage providing a detailed answer for why this is happening? Doesn't she solve the puzzle?

Even so, let's concede that human's decline in ability to eat raw food constitutes a puzzle. While this passage does describe this decline, this is not the author's main goal for writing this passage because the author offers a specific hypothesis for that decline: humans are evolutionarily adapted to eating cooked food. ​

Throughout the passage the author continues to provide a litany of evidence for this hypothesis. Why would the author do this if not to be advocating for some answer to the puzzle? This is why D is the correct answer choice over A.

Student Question:

Why do we have to negate the answer choices? And how did you negate choice E and translate it into logic?

Tutor Answer:

Overall, there is no explicit rule that you absolutely have to negate the answer choices. The negation test is a helpful means for checking if the answer choices are correct, but it certainly is not necessary. The negation test works because necessary assumptions MUST be true in order for the conclusion to be true. By testing the negation of an answer choice, we are essentially monitoring whether or not it must be true. If the conclusion could still be drawn without the answer choice, it is simply not necessary for the argument.

Sometimes, as is the case with this question, the missing assumption is really subtle. I think the negation test in this case can be really handy to determine that the answer choice is indeed necessary, even if it does not seem immediately intuitive.

From the stimulus, we know that we have no obligation to an entity unless the entity has rights, which can be diagrammed as:

• /rights --> /obligation OR as

• obligation --> rights

The next sentence simply applies that conditional to trees, but then says that trees, inherently do not have rights. This fails the necessary condition, so the author concludes that we must not have an obligation to the trees (specifically referring to the obligation not to cut that tree down. Essentially, we don't owe it to the tree, so there is not obligation not to cut down trees.

Answer choice D is essentially asking, okay, what if we don't owe it to the tree, but could there be an obligation to another entity that involves not cutting down the trees?

What about birds, for example? Let's say there is a specific bird that nests only in a specific kind of tree. What if it was agreed upon that birds were an entity that had rights? From the stimulus, we therefore could (not necessarily would given that obligation is the sufficient condition rather than the necessary condition) have an obligation to those birds. Maybe we owe this bird (for some unknown and unimportant hypothetical reason) to NOT cut down its home. Couldn't we then say that we have an obligation not to cut down the trees?

Answer choice D is essential to this argument because we are concluding that NO obligation exists simply because we don't owe it to the trees specifically. But what if we owe an obligation to the birds? Wouldn't we then still have an obligation not to cut down trees? Of course! Negating the answer choice here allows us to imagine a world where that answer choice is NOT true in order to see if the argument falls apart. In the case of answer choice D, our answer DOES fall apart.

To answer your question for E, negating answer choice E would be like saying it is NOT true that "one does not always have the right to cut down the trees on one's own property." Negating this would mean that one always has the right to cut down trees on one's own property.

Always is not a conditional indicator, so we wouldn't translate it to conditional logic.

Thinking through this intuitively, however, we can see that this is not a necessary assumption because even IF someone always had a right to cut down a tree, we do not know if they have an obligation to cut down that tree (this confuses the sufficient and necessary condition). And even so, our conclusion is about NOT having the obligation to avoid cutting down trees, so this doesn't even make sense.

Student Question:

If the phrase “Since all sides of an important story should be covered, and no newspaper adequately covers all sides of every one of its stories,” was removed from the stimulus, would the argument still be flawed or would it be okay?

Tutor Response:

In short, yes, this is still a flawed argument but for a different reason.

If we removed the information you suggested the argument would become:

Everyone should have access to more than one newspaper, for there are at least two sides to every story. Some important stories would not be adequately covered if there were only one newspaper.

The conclusion here is still that "everyone should have access to more than one newspaper." While yes, we have removed the disconnect between the "inability to cover all sides of every story with the inability to cover all sides of any important story." We now have a prescriptive conclusion (we should do something) WITHOUT a prescriptive premise (if xyz, then we SHOULD do something). In the original premises, we got prescriptive information, that all sides of a story SHOULD be covered. In the new stimulus, we do not have this.

It is always invalid to say that someone should do something by simply listing a laundry list of consequences. We need to have a connecting statement that explicitly says "if all of these consequences exist, then we should do X"

Take this argument, for example. What if I said:

"Our country should ban alcohol. Alcohol use results in a litany of adverse health effects, including high blood pressure, heart disease, liver disease, and stroke. Plus, drunk driving kills over 10,000 people per year."

While all of these facts about alcohol are true and are bad, I think there are plenty of people in the world who would vehemently disagree that we SHOULD ban alcohol. For this to be valid, we would need to include some statement like "anything whose use results in a litany of adverse health effects should be banned in our country."

Student Question:

Aren't there two conclusions here? It feels like the first two sentences could be their own separate conclusion then premise, and then same with the next two sentences.

Tutor Response:

You are correct that the first two sentences introduce a premise and conclusion relationship. The difference here is that these two sentences are provided as context for the main conclusion.

The first premise/conclusion is introducing the idea of "criticizing someone for being critical," concluding there is little plausibility to that being practice absurd (let's simplify this to "it's not absurd") The author thinks it is not absurd to criticize someone for being critical. Why? The next sentence (and premise for above) offers the idea that humans are innately required to make assessments, and some of them will inevitably be negative.

The next word, "however," indicates a transition (and is a conclusion indicator!) in this case to present a sort of exception to the above rule. The author here is making a contrast between being judgmental and being critical, claiming, "there is wisdom behind the injunction against being judgmental." (this is saying, essentially, that while it could make sense to criticize someone for being critical, it is a good idea to try to prevent being judgmental).

The final sentence is a premise for why this contrast exists, saying that judgement is not JUST assessing someone negatively (unlike criticism, which we know from above!) but rather to do so without trying to first understand the person/thing you are judging.

So while, yes, I 100% agree that there are two conclusions in this argument, remember that in looking for the MAIN conclusion, we are looking for the ultimate argument the author is trying to make.