I got this question incorrect on the first attempt because I forgot about the crucial conditional in the conclusion. Just a reminder for anyone that it might help:

when there is a conditional in the conclusion, any AC that challenges that hypothetical world is going to be irrelevant to the argument

@Gracetorres151 I originally chose E as well, and on BR, I realized that I was attracted to it because of how it was the other extreme of A.

I read through A, saw "one" and thought that's not enough...then I sped to E, saw "each" and mentally committed to that AC.

By the time I got around the B, I ruled it out because of the part about the professor not considering the observations.

• the problem with E is that the critic does not address each/every premise offered (e.g., rappers can work alone)

• what makes B correct is that it accurately describes the critic's reponse

  • for the tradition claim, the critic says that rap itself is a tradition and that it uses older songs

  • for the individual claim, the critic says that rappers have to consider the public (a different kind of collaboration that the professor did not consider)

@steamboatwillie I was just about to comment this! starting to see how the LSAT is all about understanding logical reasoning. the ac's, stims, and question types are iterations of different logical chains

My biggest takeaway from this question is that when the conclusion is attributing a trait to a specific subset, wrong answers often talk about a different subset with that trait to confuse us.

In this case, AC E bridges the gap between consumers and being rational, but ACs D and A tell us about rational consumers and add on key words from the stim

@Jandro_47 Yes, the bridge is the simple connection that links the premises to the conclusion

I think the most useful thing about explicitly writing this out is that you clearly understand what the missing gap in the stim is (if you have to fill in the facts), or what the rule is (if you have to fill in the rule)

Reminder:

If you are a dog, or you are a cat, then you are a mammal.

VALID contrapositive: if you are not a mammal, then you are not a dog and you are not a cat.

INVALID: if you are not a dog or not a cat, then you are not a mammal

• what about elephants? monkeys? horses? or literally any other mammal other than dogs and cats?

contrast that argument with this:

If you are a dog, then you are a mammal.

VALID CONCLUSION: If you are not a mammal, then you are not a dog.

when you have an A + B --> C kind of conditional logic, you will NEVER be able to conclude that /C

For those still confused about AC B (you thought it was the contrapositive), this might help

Conclusion from the stim: contempt or harm --> should not play PJ

• contrapositive with DeMorgan's:

should play PJ --> /contempt and /harm

WHERE B GOES WRONG:

• attempts to take the contrapositive, but keeps the should/should not prescription as the conclusion

  • this AC tricks you into sufficiency-necessity confusion because it negates the sufficient conditions, but it keep the conclusion the same

• REMEMBER: the rule supplied in the stim is only capable of delivering the conclusion that one should not play a practical joke

@MacBean this makes so much more sense now thank you!

@BrookeRodriguez Remind yourself of the rule and the facts that need to happen in order to trigger it. In this question, we're missing the fact that Healy's intentionally misled

@catintheLSAT You put this very well. I think a question type where the "other reasons" are crucial are in weakening/strengthening/RREs where an additional factor not considered by the argument reconciles a paradox, or strengthens/weakens an argument

@lawshosh Another thing I like to do is highlight subset words or conditional logic indicators if that helps anyone

@Isabella! I think he's referring to the facts triggering the rule. This example was one where we are given the facts & the conclusion, and we need to choose the AC that fills in the gap. AKA, the rule.

Think of it this way: only a specific set of facts will trigger the rule. We need to pick the AC that provides us with the rule that is specific to the facts in the stim and justifies the conclusion.

@rydlerjune For me, the sign for diagramming is when the stim is either fairly simple with lots of conditional logic or is fairly abstract

Most of the time, conditional logic is intuitive, but in weird questions where you see a lot of "only if" "unless" "every" etc., it might be helpful to diagram

just because you come across a conditional logic "trigger" word, that doesn't necessarily mean you should jump straight into diagramming. At the end of the day, the test uses the English language where "only" can mean multiple things in different contexts

@SwagOD Yes, it's because LSAT changed their format starting with the August LSAT

I went wrong with this question when I misinterpreted "no evidence whether"

Just because there is no evidence for a given phenomenon, that does not mean that the phenomenon does not exist

Also, if anyone needs some help with the members with a trait does not make them part of a class framework, here's a simple example:

• The fastest runners have strong calves.

• There are plenty of other people on the planet that have strong calves, but they are not necessarily part of the class that are the fastest runners

At first, I was struggling with realizing why AC D was wrong, but now it's clear: the difference it points out is irrelevant to the argument in the stim. We don't need to prove that the parks would benefit just as much as the telecoms industry. All we need is just a benefit.

AC E points out an integral part of the causal chain: competition. Without as much competition, then we can't have net benefits for consumers. This points out a relevant dissimilarity between the parks and the telecoms businesses

@EmmaDS ex: we are told that a specific task is extremely difficult

• assumption bait: it is impossible

Ex: we are told about a specific group of subset

• assumption bait: generalizes to a larger set

I don't know if anyone else saw it this way, but for me, E fit into the mold of a common wrong answer choice in WSE questions (and RRE).

It pretends to contradict a part of the argument (in this case, the claim about mild winters and less frequent bird feeding). But it fails. It tells us that feeders and naturally foraging are not mutually exclusive, but the stim never makes that claim. Therefore, it is merely consistent with the argument.

in the explanation video, I thought point on "know" vs. "belief" was very important

here's the simple explanation:

If a person knows X --> we can assume that X is, in fact, correct & the person knows it to be true

If a person believes X --> we cannot assume that X is true

• unless we are told a person "correctly believes" X

im noticing a pattern in these kinds of questions in terms of wrong answer choices

• they often give us information about another group that baits us into making the unwarranted assumption that they are analogously similar

  • e.g., --> stim is about Company A, and the answer choice tells us about its competitor, Company B

    • how do we know the two are analogous?

• like RRE wrong ACs, they add another layer to the phenomenon that, in this case, failes to weaken the explantion

• like RRE wrong ACs, they address only part of the argument (weaken it), and leave the other part (s) open to being true

@Cathyyyy I see what you mean here, and it might be a case of the right answer choice is the best one, not the ideal one. AC D is mainly wrong because it fails to explain why the fish declined in the first place, AND why the plankton decline in the first place.

• Boiled down, AC D tells us that the fish were already dying, and the plankton decline made it worse

• BUT, our tension is between the facts that Z, Y, X fish are declining while the plankton decline, but no other fish are

  • we don't care if one makes the other worse, we care what causes both to decline

@EEM I think the largest problem with AC D is that if fails to explain why the fish are starting in the first place, nor does it explain what caused the decline in P-plankton.

What AC B does that makes it correct: it identifies the reason why the fish AND the plankton are declining, and it explains why no other fish have died

I understood the stimulus perfectly here, but what tripped me up was answer choice B's wording. When I read it, I thought, how do we know Biba's next-door neighbor with a child is at the pool? Then, I eliminated it.

• now I see that the stimulus implies that the child was at the pool

I originally chose D because I thought that since there is a 12-5pm window prohibiting children under 6, then other children older than that must be there, but that is not requirement.

• what if there are no children in a given day? what if all the children swim in the morning?

@isabellagirjikian I would go back to the foundational module and re-do the mini exercises they had us do to help make the logic translation more automatic

@AutumnKelly9 You can do that by clicking the "view question" button in the top left corner under the heading banner