Blunt advice would be to sign up for a later test!! That's a lot to improve in a month. I don't want to crowd your comments section with conflicting advice with that of people who've already commented, but bottom line is I wouldn't waste an official lsat attempt if I'm 20-30 points below my goal score. Obviously anything can happen and I don't know the limitations on your situation in terms of when you have to take the test by, so best of luck, but if possible, I would reschedule!! This is a test of pattern recognition that is best ingrained across months and months of consistent & intentional study.

(Blunt again sorry) I'd be careful of letting chatgpt gaslight you into thinking "your issue isn't content" and your "underlying logic and comprehension are there." If you are scoring in the 140s, your issues are in fact content, underlying logic, and comprehension. It's great that you are more accurate on blind review. Maybe start emphasizing untimed practice so you can close the gap to the those BR scores without the aid of potentially knowing your chosen answer was incorrect. By taking sufficient time on each question to arrive at a confident answer, noting your mistakes, and being very intentional to not make them again, the time you take to arrive at answer confidently will come down over time! I promise it will, but the emphasis is on over time. Forcing yourself to cram for a test like this may not be productive.

This is a very hard stimulus to parse through. My suggestion here is that if you struggle to understand what the argument is actually saying, you can use the following guidelines: in general, establishing representativeness (language of "the same" etc) helps/strengthens evidence whereas denying representativeness (language of "differs") hurts it. A, B, D, and E in one way or another say the evidence may not be representative of what is being inferred. C is the answer choice that says no this is good evidence, because it tells us that evidence is representative of something it's trying to prove. That's how you can can a little more confidently select the correct answer on a tough problem like this

@crorosco02956 Apologies for not getting to this comment sooner; I tend to ask students how they've preferred to get tutored in the past and base it on that, but with most students I suggest a dynamic where they tell me areas of recent issues before a session and then I will hand pick 5-10 questions that I think are representative of said issues to work through with them. We then go through each problem very slowly where I hear their take on the stimulus and then I offer mine, and we repeat that for each answer choice, emphasizing takeaways that can be applied to future problems. I don't think it's good to move on from a concept or argument until it's fully understood, so for that reason sometimes we get through as little as one or two questions throughout the hour.

@StafarahMorilus feel free to DM me or schedule a consultation! Just doing a first come-first serve basis

Hi, I offer tutoring at pretty cheap rates (a few more spots at $18/hour) and I focus on mastery of the fundamentals of LR with the specific goal of helping students raise their scores into the 160s. Feel free to check out more information or schedule a call with me on my website: www.fundamentlr.com

I am just starting to tutor and I am focusing on making the lsat tutoring experience more accessible for to those who can't afford extreme prices. I charge $18/hour with a free consultation and two free session afterwards to see if it's a good fit. You're welcome to check out my site here: https://www.fundamentlr.com/home

For you and those in similar situations, I am just beginning to tutor with the specific goal of helping people score in the 160s by mastering the fundamentals. For the first several students I take on I am charging $18/hour, check out my site if you want! www.fundamentlr.com

C is an immediate elimination but it is subtle: "When X happens... bla bla bla"

but we have no reason to believe X will happen at all from the passage so this cannot be supported

@BrianDowney this is a sufficient assumption question (see "conclusion follows logically" in question stem), not a necessary assumption question, so extreme language is helpful. often in order to guarantee the truth of a conclusion, which is the job here, we will need extreme language.

@brine exact same for me

@HeathHughes agreed that this is overlooked in the explanation-- i guess the explanation would be that all things considered even with this slight caveat to the code being fine as is, it still constitutes a "general defense" whereas answers A and C don't really get at the core idea of the second paragraph, the fact that the oath remains good. Would appreciate a tutor chiming in on this though

this is one of those where theres only one answer that even remotely makes sense so just pick that

something ive noticed on the lsat is that there is often the following relationship between content and answer choice or vice versa in a most strongly supported question: where one says usually, generally, tends to, frequently etc or basically anything implying "most of the time" the LSAT will want you to conclude that there is also a likely/unlikely (probabilistic) relationship between the two phenomena

E is almost necessary for the argument to work-- if no works of art lose their appeal when serving function other than original, then how could we say that a distinguishing characteristic of sophistication in the arts is defined by essentially the opposite! (the reason for sophistication being art NOT losing appeal when serving function other than original)

this is a cool demonstration of the idea that if X is correlated with Y and Z is correlated with X, there may be no overlap between instances of X (smoking) that cause Y (heart disease) and instances of X that correlate with Z (caffeine). in fact, it may even be that when taken in tandem, caffeine and smoking PREVENT heart disease! (lol) like we can imagine a scenario where having a dangerous disease is correlated with an early death and having said dangerous disease is also correlated with taking a medicine for it, but instances of dangerous disease + medicine is then NOT correlated with early death!

@JeromeSong for this reason I also took a while on the question I'm glad you pointed this out

this is an awesome question

@HappyTestTaker 1) I would argue yes and 2) Since that is not a faithful interpretation of the answer choice, you shouldn't have to worry about that being within the realm of possibility!

The logical jump you have to make here is that if one gives permission to do something, then it is within their wishes that it happen. If you wished any other outcome, the reasonable person would probably not give permission. It makes sense a little more intuitive sense to me via its contrapositive: if it is not wished to happen, they certainly would not give permission.

@LiviaLSAT the answer choice says "even if the former does not impede the latter." The argument's conclusion is that it's baseless to say that the former impedes the latter, or in other words, the former does not impede the latter. This answer choice concedes the truth of the author's conclusion, so it cannot be the flaw! The author simply cares to show that the former (programs encouraging superstition) does not impede latter (public scientific understanding), so they are not liable to consider any indirect effect on the pervasiveness or whatever. This AC is attributing a stronger position to the television network executive than they in fact took. Sure, maybe there is some indirect effect, but anything short of impediment is fair game.

In other words, this is like taking an argument that asserts that a car is painted blue on the outside and trying to say it is flawed because even if it is in fact blue on the outside, you neglected to mention that the steering wheel is red!

premise: sound management of resource -> price reflects ALL unintended harm to society

conclusion: sound management of resource -> price reflects ALL unintended harm to environment

one sufficient assumption could be if a resource's prices reflects all UH to to society, it reflects all UH to environment. this works because it copies the stimulus language word for word and operates under the laws of formal logic where A->B combined with B->C lets us conclude A->C.

since the language is quite repetitive, it could make sense to find an assumption that is more subtle. if all unintended harm to society is contained within all unintended harm to environment (in other words the opposite of ac A; UH to society is a subset within UH to env; UHsoc->UHenv), does that let us conclude sound management of resource -> price reflects ALL unintended harm to environment?

this isn't saying that all UHsoc being covered implies that all UHenv is covered, rather, it is saying that if an element constitutes unintended harm to society, it is also doing UH to the environment. the SA that myself and others were looking for is that all unintended harm to society being priced in implies all unintended harm to environment being priced in, but that is not what is presented.

I think no, because in this case where if there is one single UH to society, it will also be a UH to environment , there could be elements of unintended harm to environment that are NOT unintended harm to society. For this reason, a premise that says "Whatever constitutes unintended harm to society also constitutes unintended harm to the environment" would in fact NOT be sufficient, because it doesn't cover situations where unintended harm to the environment is not an unintended harm to society, so the conclusion that sound management of resources leads to prices that reflect all UH to environment does not follow from the premise that it reflects all unintended harm to society, because the UH to society is a subset!

So instead we need UH to environment to be the subset, in other words what answer choice A says. The interesting thing is that this implies the expected sufficient assumption: if a resource's prices reflects all UH to to society, it reflects all UH to environment. How does this make sense, because it seems to be the reversal at face value? The difference lies in the observation that if X->Y (X is a subset of Y) then you can infer that something that invokes all Y (call it Z) also invokes all X. Usually we are accustomed to thinking that if X->Y and Z->Y then X is not necessarily involved because elements of set Y not in X may be invoked instead. The tricky thing about this stimulus is Y (cost to society) is modified by us caring about the ENTIRE cost to society. So, if the entire cost is reflected (every element in Y), the entirety of X (cost to environment) is necessarily involved.

I've been trying to come up with a more simplistic example.

If being a dog implies being a mammal, then we can conclude that if all mammals are warm blooded then all dogs are warm blooded. But we can't infer that all dogs being warm blooded implies that all mammals are warm blooded, which would be analogous to inferring that if pricing reflects all harm to environment then it reflects all harm to society from the fact that a harm to environment implies being a harm to society. However, we can infer the proper conclusion, which is that if pricing reflects all harm to society then it reflects all harm to environment, because harms to environment are the subset, just like dogs are the subset of mammals!

Would love to hear how others think about this/if I'm thinking about it correctly because it seems like an element of logic that was not covered in the core curriculum, so for that reason I assume situations like this won't arise too much on the LSAT.

D is not crucial because the perceived value according to the kids is what matters, not the objective relevance. However, I would imagine that another necessary assumption is that there is in fact a proportional relationship across the entire spectrum of change as a function of deference, since the stimulus only tells us about the two opposite ends of the spectrum (rapid vs slow)

the key here is to notice that the stimulus says "seems like" !!! this is indicative of human biases coming into play & is a hint that something like C will be relevant and also lowers the burden of proof that the correct answer needs to have.