Review:

Glad I was not the only one who really struggled with this question. This was a rare question that absolutely stumped me, and I had no idea of a path forward essentially because I couldn't figure out what the heck the stimulus was saying. I honestly had to dumb this down like I was 5 and go P.O.E. for review. I feel like if this happens test day, I am better of picking and skipping because I will try to go down a rabbit hole with this.

Question type: NA

Argument summarized: (phenomenon-hypothesis)

1.) A study of 30 years of weather pattern records of cities indicate that weekend days tend to be cloudier than weekdays. (AKA: Saturdays and Sundays are cloudier than the rest of the week.)

2.) The small amount of seven-day cycles (Mon., Tues, etc...) that occur naturally are not significant enough to cause measurable weather patterns.

Conclusion (hypothesis): Now, no one can deny that human activity has actual large scale effects on the weather. (OR, human activity DOES have actual large scale effects on the weather, and everyone has been mistaken).

Essentially, they noticed a thing that occurs under specific conditions, and made a specific cause and effect argument from a correlation. Timing is a huge element of this argument. The fact that two things have the same timing/pattern doesn't prove that the cause has to have that same timing/pattern.

For example, every Saturday, I notice a man falling off his bicycle. I conclude that there must be something happening every Saturday to make this dude fall off his bike. What if the man falling off his bicycle every Saturday is actually caused by something else that doesn't happen on that day? For example, on Friday nights, the dude always goes out to party and is hungover Saturday so he falls off his bike a lot. I just identified a different pattern that is not the one I hypothesized to be correct.

I just showed that the cause doesn't have to share the same timing pattern as the effect. Boom!

Review:

This a question that made me second guess myself during timed testing conditions. I honestly thought C was way too easy, and that they would be going for something more subtle. However, I've noticed with a complex stimulus like this one, test writers often make the correct answer choices deceptively simple. Maybe this is their way of trying to be nice, but it definitely feels wrong in the moment while testing.

Question type: NA

Argument summarized: (Experiment w/ a phenomenon-hypothesis)

A doctor hypothesizes that nerve inflammation is reduced by a cortisone shot, and hypothesizes further that pressure on the nerve was causing a patient's back and leg pain.

The patient is experiencing a phenomenon where the doctor provided a cortisone shot to their nerve, which resulted in pain relief.

The scientific context or support is that pressure on a nerve causes nerve inflammation which causes pain.

Assumptions: The doctor is actually correct and there is not some placebo effect going on. They have only one person mentioned in this kind of experiment, which makes me wonder if they knew what treatment they were going to receive beforehand and if they knew the expected results. That could negatively impact the integrity of the experiment. The doctor also assumed that their causal chain is correct, and that there are not other factors at play that could produce this kind of pain. They are limiting it. What if the person has preexisting health conditions like diabetes, which also cause this same type of pain, and their causal chain is wrong?

Wrong Answer: D. I chose this first pass because I honestly thought C was too easy and the test writers were trying to trick me. D is wrong because it is too limiting. The doctor is not making that strong of an argument, saying that corisone is the only thing that can cause a reduction, this is just their solution in this specific circumstance. Beware of test makers trying to get you to make things stronger than they actually are.

Correct Answer: C. This was a "duh" answer for me that I overlooked. This answer is correct because if the patient knew they were receiving the cortisone shot and knew the expected results, that could negatively impact the integrity of the experiment. This does not tell us anything about the actual experiment's validity. Did the cortisone shot actually work or was it the patient's belief?

Hi there! I am definitely interested!

Review:

This question messed with me so badly. I got it wrong on the actual test, but got it correct in blind review with unlimited time.

Question type: RRE Except

Paradox: Why is the retail profit margin on personal computer sales extremely low compared to that of other popular high technology items when consumer demand for personal computers is increasing yearly?

Prephrases of what may solve paradox: Technology advances so quickly that it is difficult for personal computers to keep up with other high technology items. All of the personal computers being sold are on sale/discounted, so a lot of people want to buy them, but there are more attractive high technology items that people choose instead.

The right answer in this case will be something that does NOT solve the paradox. Common trap answer choices for RRE add a premise as a fact that does nothing for the argument, or only solves one part of the paradox.

Answer A: Fits with prephrase I came up with initially. This is OK.

Answer B: This deals with satisfaction. I broke this apart by asking myself: If I am really loyal to a computer brand (satisfied), wouldn't it make more sense for me to keep buying that brand over being swayed by other attractive high technology items? For me, this answer choice deepens the paradox, because the answer choice should be answering something about the retail profit margin on computer sales being low compared to other high tech items. The argument is implying that popular high tech items are making LESS of a profit compared to personal computer sales out of all retail sales total. This answer tilts in the opposite direction. Therefore, this is the right answer.

Answer C: Makes sense. For example, an person setting up a Macbook for their personal office may need a lot more help from employees than other tech items like a set of nice headphones. This is OK.

Answer D: Solves the paradox by talking about how sales on personal computers bring in customers, but they end up being swayed by something more flashy. Also similar to one of my prephrases, this is OK.

Answer E: More stores selling personal computers at discounted rates would explain this as well, this is similar to one of my prephrases, so this is OK too.

The only answer that does not solve the paradox, or deepens it, is B. There for it is correct.

Review:

Seeing J.Y. cross out all of the answer choices like I did while doing this question under timed conditions was so vindicating. This is such a hard question, that I couldn't even figure out what the right answer was on blind review. What really tripped me up with this question however, is what J.Y. identified is that the arrow is going the wrong way in Answer choice A. I eliminated A my first go around for this reason too!

Even after watching J.Y.'s explanation video and Kevin's notes, I'm not sure I get it. The correct answer is actually using set logic, which I haven't seen done for a SA question before. I think the most realistic solution to approaching a very challenging question like this is doing P.O.E. with answer choices based upon strength and scope of the answer choice. Questions like these are such a time sink.

Review:

Question type: SA. The right answer will make the conclusion valid. We are looking for something air tight, or a missing puzzle piece that completes the puzzle.

I had the hardest time prephrasing for this question. It really helped to see Kevin's explanation. That the gap missing is about PURPOSE. It makes sense because the premises are a set of facts, and the conclusion is about the city council's objective/purpose/mission. Therefore, we need to connect the facts we know to the city council's purpose.

Prephrase: The city council already knew about the possible negative effects of putting in a rent control ordinance, and knowing this, they decided to pass the rent control ordinance anyways.

Answer A: Wrong because it's out-of-scope/irrelevant. The study being conducted by impartial investigators does not give us a WHY about the city council's decision.

Answer B: Wrong because it is out-of-scope, and regardless, "appropriate topic" does not equal purpose/objective. Who cares about what is an appropriate topic or not, this has not effect on the argument.

Answer C: Correct because this suggests the city council already knew about the possible effects, since they agreed with the study's conclusion about rent control. This is within our scope, and actually gives us a WHY for the city council making this decision.

Answer D: Wrong because this is irrelevant and does not allow us to draw our conclusion. It is also not strong enough. "Some" members is not the strength we need to make a conclusion about all members of the city council.

Answer E: Wrong because this is also irrelevant. This answer is a trap answer choice because it actually does not answer anything about the city council's objective/purpose, it just adds a fact that they sometimes act weird.

What I can do for next time: I got this wrong because I went into the answer choices without a prephrase. Next time, I can look closer at the language in the conclusion and how it compares to the premises.

Review:

This was a difficult passage for me. I think I made the majority of my errors here because I could not figure out how to dumb this down into something I could understand in timed conditions. It wasn't until I reread each passage during Blind Review, that I seemed to get it.

Passage A: Public funding and support for the arts is justified (meaning, funded by tax-payers dollars) because it builds social capital and allows more equitable opportunities for people to experience cultures.

Passage B: There is no justification for art subsidized by public, tax-payer money because it will generally not be the art that most tax-payers would have chosen for themselves.

Correct Answer: D. It was easy for me to see that the Passage A author agrees with this statement. Passage B author disagrees more implicitly, shown by paragraph 2. Essentially, B is arguing that public funding for the arts is not going to give more people opportunities to experience art because the art is already preselected for them by committees.

Wrong Answer: B. Upon second glance, this answer seems so word-salady to me. I chose it without examining it closely to what is mentioned and implied in both passages. This answer sounds nice, but it is actually wrong because both authors agree if you look back in the passages.

Review:

This is Question 16 in the middle of an LR section. If I am seeing multiple premises using complex conditional logic and no easy chains are popping out to me immediately, I am skipping questions like this and coming back to them later if/when I have time. I feel like this question wastes way too much time, which is further exacerbated by the fact it is an except question.

Review:

Seeing the visual graphic really helped me understand this question and why the correct answer is correct.

Question type: must be true

Stimulus summarized:

1. A type of celestial object named X (Quasars) are so far away that it takes their light 500 million years to reach Earth.

2. For X to appear from Earth's perspective, it would have to burn at a rate that produces more light than 90 billion suns would produce.

3. However, nothing that burns at a rate that produces that much light could exist for more than 100 million years.

The light of X takes time to travel to our eyes in order for us to see it. It takes millions of years for the light to travel to Earth for it to appear in front of our eyes to see. I understood this argument better when I thought of how we may see the flash of supernovas here on Earth, but because they are so far away, we are essentially looking back in time on the event because the light takes a long time to travel here. Because X was burning at so high a rate to produce that high amount of light, it means that it could not have existed for more than 100 million years.

Correct Answer: E. Each word can be proven by looking back at the stimulus. Because of the brightness quasars burn at does not last longer than 100 million years, and what light we are seeing now on Earth is at least 500 million years old, we are seeing something that no longer exists. I didn't pick this answer initially because I thought "duh it no longer exists". I feel like this correct answer was hiding in plain sight because it's so simple once you actually get it.

Wrong Answer: C. I definitely missed the qualifier dropping. The argument is talking about what applies to quasars specifically and how we see them from Earth. "Anything that from Earth appears as bright as a quasar does must..." This is wrong because it is misrepresenting what the argument is actually trying to talk about in my opinion. We can only draw a conclusion about something very specific (quasars) because of very specific factors (how their burn rate produces X amount of light and how long burning at this high rate can last). C messes that up completely.

What I can do for next time: Watch the qualifiers! Wrong answer choices will drop or make qualifiers way too strong than they actually are in the argument.

Review:

This question took me a stupid amount of time to figure out.

Question type: must be true

Argument summarized:

1. Some people believe X (that saying an organization is hierarchical says everything to say about how that organization operates

2. Bureaucratically controlled org. -> hierarchical

3. The PWD is an example of a bureaucratically controlled org., but it operates differently than how MOST other bureaucratically controlled orgs. operate.

My first thoughts after reading this was "How the heck does Sentence 1 connect to Sentences 2 and 3?"

Inferences: The PWD is a bureaucratically controlled org., so it is hierarchical. However, knowing the company is hierarchical does not tell us everything about how this company operates because it operates differently than most other bureaucratically controlled organizations. This connects back to sentence 1. Meaning, saying an organization is hierarchical DOES NOT say everything to say about how that organization actually operates. Sentence one is arguing A->B. However, the argument negates it and denies this relationship by saying A <-some->/B with what is implied by Sentence 3.

Correct Answer: D. Not all = some. This answer stood out to me because it was an inference I made after working through the argument without timed conditions. This gets at the core idea of A <-some->/B. Not all hierarchical organizations operate in the same way because the PWD operates quite differently than how other bureaucratically controlled orgs. typically operate.

Wrong Answer: A. Not directly supported by the stimulus. I eliminated this answer because it was making a comparison where the stimulus did not include enough information to correctly draw that comparison.

Wrong Answer: B. First glace, my gut told me this is too strong. We have one sentence with an all conditional and one essentially with a most conditional. Any inference I needed to draw would be weaker than one with something as absolute as any/all.

Wrong Answer: C. This is not supported by the stimulus. I feel like this answer is trying to bait us into making an assumption. Hierarchical organizations can just operate differently from what we know in the stimulus, which does not imply NOTHING can reliably be concluded about how that organization actually operates. Too strong again.

Wrong Answer: E: Too strong again. The stimulus is not making this strong of a claim. It is just saying that a company being hierarchical doesn't tell us everything there is to know about how that org. operates.

What I can do for next time: Rely upon strengths of premises in the argument when judging answer choices. I feel like a lot of the wrong answer choices are too strong based upon what we know in the stimulus. A MBT answer is correct if every single word is 100% supported by the stimulus.

Review:

I got this answer choice right in my actual test and blind review, but I wanted to go back again and review it because I answered this pretty intuitively and wanted to make sure my core structures were fine.

Question type: NA

Argument summarized:

Premises: If freely choosing to do something, then it is not wrong to pay someone to do something. If someone is NOT freely choosing to do something, then it is wrong to pay them to do it.

Conclusion: Test subjects being volunteers who are told about risks and compensated for risks is not sufficient enough to defend the testing procedures for new medications.

Assumptions: The volunteers for the experiment are actually volunteering because they want to, not because someone is making them or they are under duress. (Example: They are only doing the experiment because they want to get paid, someone is pressuring them to do it, etc.) Just because you are informed of the risks and being paid, is not sufficient to show you are freely choosing to do the experiment and are not under duress.

Correct Answer: A. Fills a gap needed to get to our negative conclusion. Having knowledge of the consequences of testing procedures does not mean that one is freely choosing to do the experiment on their own.

Review:

Question type: Flaw

Identify the flaw: Pointing out someone's argument isn't persuasive doesn't mean their conclusion isn't true. A conclusion can be true regardless of whether the argument given for it is persuasive/strong or not.

Wrong Answer: C. The author is rejecting the idea that two things (education of students and providing of consumer goods) are analogous. They do not treat them as identical.

Correct Answer: E. Inadequate = unconvincing. The author (faculty member) is rejecting someone's (the president's) argument because they think their reasons aren't strong enough to prove that their conclusion is true.

What I can do for next time: I identified the flaw correctly, but I could not identify the right answer. I got confused by the strong referential phrasing in the answer choices. Next time, I can work harder on matching referential phrasing back to the stimulus.

Review:

This was a question that stumped me before and after viewing the explanation video. In order to understand it, I broke it down like I was 5. Hope this is helpful for anyone struggling like me.

Question type: Flaw

Flaw type: Author assumes "small percentage" = "underrepresented"

When percentages and amounts are mentioned, that's a yellow flag in my mind to start thinking this is a math flaw type question.

The argument talks about:

Percent of Group A that is in Group B

Group A: amount of people from service professions

Group B: amount of people who become board members at top corporations

There is a very small percent of people from service professions (Group A) who become board members at top corporations (Group B).

But concludes something about:

Percent of Group B that comes from Group A

There is a small percent of people who become board members at top corporations (Group B) that come from service professions (Group A).

Just because we know something about Group A in Group B, doesn't mean we know something about Group B in Group A.

Imagine there are 1,000 animals.

• Only 10 are elephants.

• At the zoo, 1 out of 100 animals is an elephant.

Is the zoo underrepresenting elephants?

No, because elephants only make up about 1% of all animals in this example.

Review:

Passage type: Spotlight

Low res summary:

1. Introduction to topic: corrido folk song

2. Analysis of structure of corridos: use of metaphors

3. Further analysis of structure of corridos: closing verse (despedida)

Main point: The corrido is a type of narrative folk song that comes from the border of the US and Mexico which can incorporate simple metaphors and formal closing verses.

Author tone: informative

Perspectives?: We only get one perspective, which is the author's analysis of the structural patterns within corridos.

Question type: Most strongly suggest author agrees (what is implied that the author agrees with)

Wrong Answer: B. There is no comparison to the corrido to other ballad forms. We get the cultural history of how they originated, but there is never a comparison between this type of folk song and other types of folk song. I chose this answer because of the "familiar mainly to local audiences." However, this is wrong as well because the whole sentence does not match up with what is mentioned in the text.

Right answer: E. This is implied in the text with the sentence: "Such imagery, highly conventional and readily recognizable to corrido listeners, reflects and strengthens the continuity of the corrido tradition." I saw the inference that parts of the corrido were transferable to other corrido songs, but I didn't get that it would still be recognizable without the despedida. The author of the passage is not making a claim about the structures of corridos need a despedida in order to identify them, they are merely identifying the despedida as a pattern that occurs in the structures of corridos.

What I can do for next time: Make sure every part of the answer choice on these types of questions is supported by the text in some way (indirectly or directly).

This is some nasty work putting a parallel flaw question right at the end and having the last answer choice be the correct one. The flaw is simple, it's just going through all of the answer choices one by one that takes the most time and energy. LSAT writers are betting on you feeling burnt out and mentally exhausted by the end of a section and making a stupid mistake here. It was extremely frustrating to get this wrong under timed conditions, then get it right in BR. In BR, the right answer jumped out at me so easily. I guess I need to improve on reading for structure quicker under timed conditions.

Review:

Question type: SA

For SA questions, we need to add a premise that will make the conclusion valid. A missing puzzle piece that completes our puzzle.

Argument summarized:

Context: Some managers believe the best way to maximize employee performance is to institute stiff competition among employees.

Premise: But, in situations where a competitor is seen as clearly better, others become anxious and doubt their own ability to perform.

Conclusion: Stiff competition can undermine the goal of maximizing employee performance.

Bridge: In competitive situations where employees become anxious and doubt their abilities, it can weaken their employee performance instead of maximizing it.

Answer A: This is wrong because we don't care about perception making someone win.

Answer B: This is wrong because we don't care about how someone wins a competition. We are about getting to the conclusion of how competition hurts employee performance.

Answer C: Trap answer choice. We need to build a bridge about competition anxiety hurting employee performance, rather than how employee performance improves.

Answer D: Basically says, if you have anxiety about performing, it can negatively impact your overall performance as an employee. This is the bridge we need.

Answer E: Out of scope. We don't care about workers who undermine the confidence of eachother and their win rate in competitions.

Review:

Question type: NA

Argument (phenomenon/hypothesis) summarized: Human skin emits certain gaseous substances, both of which attract mosquitoes. BUT, neither one substance or the other, or even when they're combined together, attract mosquitoes as much as the bare human arm will. Mosquitoes will find the bare human arm even in total darkness, where they can't see anything to indicate a human arm is there. Therefore, there has to be some other gaseous substance emitted by human skin that also attracts mosquitoes.

Assumptions: The human arm actually emits another substance that CAN be detected by mosquitoes besides the two that we know of already. Also, there are no other factors at play that would cause the mosquitoes to find the arm in the dark, example, wearing a certain deodorant or perfume that they can identify easily.

Answer A: Negated, mosquitoes do communicate with eachother. Who cares? How does this impact my argument? By implying they talk to eachother and find the arm together? This does not eliminate any alternative explanations and does nothing for the actual argument.

Answer B: Negated, mosquitoes are attracted to body heat. This provides an alternate explanation that shatters the argument's plausibility if this negation is true, and it is similar to one of the assumptions I identified. This is the correct answer.

Answer C: Negated, human skin does not give off any greater gaseous substances in greater amounts during the day than the night. Great, who cares? Mosquitoes can still find the arm in the dark regardless. This feels like a trap answer choice.

Answer D: Negated, mosquitoes are at least as successful in finding a bare human darkness as they can find in the light. Again, who cares. Does not need to be true in order for my conclusion to be possible.

Answer E: Negated, human skin gives off at least some gaseous substances that repel mosquitoes. Who caress?! They can still find the arm in the dark regardless.

Side note: I have been taking a more sassy approach in my head with necessary assumption questions, and it seems to be helping!

Review:

Question Type: RRE EXCEPT (the right answer will be something that does nothing to explain the contradiction, or makes it worse)

Phenomena in need of explanation:

There are two populations, indigenous Tasmanians and indigenous Australians. They are related, but they were separated geographically when a land bridge connecting the two disappeared 10,000 years ago. With this separation, there became differences apparent in each culture. Why do the indigenous Tasmanians, have no domestic dogs, fishing nets, polished stone tools, or hunting implements when their Aussie relatives do?

Prephrases: Because the land connecting them disappeared, Tasmanians adapted to their environment in different ways than the Aussies did. They developed different tools of their own that worked better for their environment.

Answer A: Fits sort of with my prephrase. They abandoned practicess they shared with their Aussie relatives, hence why they no longer use them. This works, next!

Answer B: If Tasmanians were actually the ones to develop these tools, then why are they no longer using them? Did something else happen? This answer choice makes things worse. I'm picking this one, but going through the others just in case.

Answer C: The new tools were given to the Aussies after the land bridge connecting them disappeared, so it would make sense why the Tasmanians don't have them. Next.

Answer D: This is a different version of my prephrase. Aussies were the ones to develop these new tools for their new environment after the land bridge geographically connecting them disappeared. Works.

Answer E: The tools in question were developed by a specific group of Aussiess who never interacted with the Tasmanians before the land bridge went away. They never developed these tools because they never met the actual groups of people who used and created them. Works.

After reviewing all of these answers, B is correct because it adds a new fact that makes things worse. It created another question in my mind to answer, rather than solving the original question and contradiction we sought to answer in the first place.

Review:

Question type: Flaw

Argument summarized: A person who is writing a letter to the editor arguing that the editor's proposal for disposal of contaminated dredge would damage commercial fishing operations. The person supports this argument by citing that 20,000 people have signed petitions against the editor's approach in favor of a different solution.

Identify the flaw(s): People who sign petitions about something usually have some strong beliefs or biases about something. Furthermore, there is no indication that the 20,000 people who signed have any authority or evidence to support their alternative solution. They just propose something else. Are these people scientists with years of experience? Or are they regular people with no specialized experience? We don't know. Also, just because 20,000 people signed a petition in favor of something else doesn't mean they're actually correct.

Wrong Answer: A. A is a trap answer choice that seems like it's baiting you to make an assumption not supported by the text. We don't know anything about the editor's view/proposal actually. We just know that 20,000 petitioners are hating on it. There is no view to distort if we have no idea what that view even is.

Correct Answer: D. The argument's conclusion is that the editor's proposal sucks which is supported by 20,000 people who signed a petition in opposition of the editor's approach in favor of something else. We don't know anything about these people, whether they're scientists with years of experience or strongly opinionated Karens with too much time on their hands. This correctly states the flaw.

What I can do for next time: Focus on the wording in the stimulus. Specifically, does every part of it match the answer choice? Is that something the argument is actually doing structurally/explicitly stated, or is it baiting me to make an assumption that's not there?

Review:

Question type: Weaken

Side note: The correct answer felt so weak (imo) I didn't pick it the first time around. For the stimulus, I pictured a guy swinging around one of those electric fly swatter things and then taking an inventory after swinging it around him a bit what he killed. I think this mental image I created ended up not helping me lol.

Notable assumptions: The author assumes that 12 mosquitoes is not representative of the entire mosquito population for that area. But what if there were actually only 12 damn mosquitoes in the area? Then the device would be going 12/12 on mosquito kills and therefore the device would be an effective way to control the mosquito population there. This argument fails to take into consideration there could actually be just a low population number of mosquitoes in the area.

Correct Answer: A. Maybe there were really only 12 mosquitos in the population area and this thing is actually effective. If there are no live mosquitoes in the vicinity after the test, yay they all died! Congrats, the device did it's job by killing all of the mosquitoes around it and was effective. Even if it killed only 12 mosquitoes, it killed 12/12 mosquitoes.

What I can do for next time: I knew the weakener was going to be in the amount somehow, and answer choicer A appears very weak on first glance I didn't pick it. However, it does weaken the argument compared to the other choices which do nothing or help it. Next time, beware of answer choices that seem very weak. It could actually be the right one.

Review:

Question type: Flaw

Argument summarized:

Premise 1: cancer causing synthetic compound amount in daily lives < cancer causing nonsynthetic compound amount in daily lives

Conclusion: It is stupid to believe the recent rise in cancer rate is because of synthetic carcinogens.

Identify the flaw: Not considering frequency of exposure. For example, someone being exposed to low does of radiation very frequently compared to someone being exposed to a high dose just once, could add up to more damage done by the low doses because of their high frequency. This just depends upon the frequency or amount concentration.

Right Answer: D. Even though the synthetic compound amount in our daily lives is smaller, it could be that us getting exposed to it more frequently is the cause.

What I can do for next time: I did not identify this flaw. This can be categorized as a type of math flaw, where frequency/concentration amount are an issue.

Review:

Question type: Strengthen

Argument summarized (phenomenon-hypothesis):

Phenomenon: babies paying more attention to specific musical intervals.

Hypothesis: humans probably are genetically predisposed to pay attention to more specific musical interval than others.

In order to strengthen, we need to eliminate alternate causes that explain our phenomenon. We want our explanation to be the only one that stands. Since this is an experiment as well, we also want to eliminate other factors that could cause doubt in the plausibility of our hypothesis. (ex, the babies not being randomly selected, there not being a control group, etc.)

Assumptions: We are making a jump from a phenomenon about babies to a conclusion about the human race. We are also making a jump to conclude something being genetically predisposed from a phenomenon about babies attention spans.

Wrong Answer: A. I chose A because I thought if the experiment could be replicated in other age groups, this would support the argument of genetics being the causal factor. However, A is just reaffirming that there is a correlation. We need a causal link. Furthermore, babies are like a blank slate when it comes to knowledge of the world. As we age, our knowledge grows and it's easier for us to be influenced because we can take more in.

Correct Answer: B. Babies being a blank slate when it comes to music exposure is helpful to our argument because it eliminates other factors that could cause doubt for the plausibility of our hypothesis. For example, if the moms were playing music all the time with their babies before the experiment took place, this could influence things.

What I can do for next time: Watch for trap answers like A. A is showing a correlation, but not strengthening the causal argument at play. It looks nice, but it essentially does nothing.

Review:

Question type: principle/rule application

Argument summarized: /have overwhelming evidence -> ought to fulfill duty

I am looking for an argument where we do not have overwhelming evidence that fulfilling a duty will have disastrous consequences (premises), then we should fulfill that duty (conclusion).

Wrong Answer: D. I got this question wrong because this argument seemed so backwards to me, and that even when I mapped it out, I was like "this is a rule that makes no sense."

Conclusion: ought to fulfill duty

Premises: has overwhelming evidence that fulfilling duty will have disastrous consequences (violating the confidentiality of her patient as a psychiatrist if she fulfills her duty to report to the authorities).

I can see I did this question a bit differently than the example, but this made the most sense to me by mapping it out with straight conditional reasoning.

Correct Answer: A. In this case we do not have overwhelming evidence that fulfilling a duty will have disastrous consequences. This is show in "might harm their chance at obtaining an internship". Who cares that lowering a student's grade MIGHT do something negative? This is not a disastrous consequence.

Conclusion: ought to fulfill duty

Premises: do not have overwhelming evidence that fulfilling duty will have disastrous consequences (fulfilling her duty to not raise the student's grade MIGHT harm their chance at obtaining an internship)

What I can do for next time: Even if the rule seems clunky and stupid, we still have to follow it. Try to match strength of wording in answer choices to stimulus as another test to see what is correct.

Review:

Question type: flaw

Identify flaw: Author is making a claim that some society is the first to do something just because they found evidence that supports this theory. However, someone can be the first to do something and not have evidence of it/record it in history. What if someone else was producing alcohol before the Egyptians and we just don't know? Timing/chronology is a central part of this argument.

Wrong Answer: A. I chose this answer because I thought they were using the cup as the sole reason for making the argument that Egyptians were the first society to produce alcoholic beverages. However, using the cup as evidence functioned to support the timing argument, not necessarily make it representative of Egyptian society as a whole.

Right Answer: D. Correctly summarizes my flaw I identified. For example, hunter-gatherers could have produced alcoholic beverages before everyone else, and we may just not have the archeological evidence for it. Just because we have this ancient Egyptian cup, it doesn't necessarily mean it was the first instance of a society producing alcoholic beverages.

What I can do for next time: Watch the structure of the argument more. How do the structure of the premises support the structure of the conclusion? What gaps are there in this structure?

Review:

Low-Res summaries for each paragraph:

1. Intro to legal theory

2. Legal theory applied w/ driving - coordination

3. Legal theory applied w/ prohibiting steroids - goal of preventing harm

Author's argument: Lack of coordinating rule can be harmful + goal is to prevent harm = justify legal sanctions against nonconforming behavior

Wrong Answer: E is a trap answer. It sounds nice, and sounds like it would fit, but it is not actually necessary for the author's argument. In order to justify compelling coordination of people's activities, there needs to be an "assumption that all people would voluntarily agree to be subject to a coordination rule backed by criminal sanctions."

Correct Answer: D. "voluntarily agree" means that someone is consenting. This is a paraphrase that can be traced directly back to the passage.