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.

@yanlaodun491 sure but his argument assumes that there is 1. yes maybe 100 MIGHT not produce enough dust, but at the very least it makes it more likely!! Trent's implicit premise is the one crater was not sufficient for the dust ("THAT asteroid crater is not large enough..."), so to learn that many asteroids struck the earth weakens his reasoning! it doesn't have to prove him wrong, just compromise the support he provides for his claim. remember, argument being proven invalid =/= being proven wrong, which is a classic flaw that we sometimes see in lsat arguments and is good to remember.

@ConnerKline this one can be done by pretty quickly pattern matching: highlight the conclusion in the stimulus and notice it is a "some" claim, so eliminate D and E. then revisit the premises and notice we are working with 1) a "some" claim and 2) an "all" claim and notice that C and A don't match so by POE it is B

@catherism a gift being generous is an unreachable conclusion, so you can scan for that conclusion and eliminate any AC's that mention it. the stimulus tells us requirements for generosity, but nothing that is sufficient for generosity. in principle-conform questions, the correct answer will always be reachable by a sufficient condition.

"A gift is not generous unless it is intended to benefit the recipient and is worth more than what is expected or customary in the situation;"

translated, means if gift is generous, it will be intended to benefit recipient and worth more than expected.

we can arrive at the fact that a gift is not generous by denying one or more of the necessary conditions, as D does.

however, we can't ever conclude that a gift is in fact generous, because we only know requirements for it being generous! these requirements can be met without the gift actually being generous-- they are only there to tell us that if any of them AREN'T met, the gift has no chance at being generous.

regarding the reasoning, even if intention + more than expected/customary was sufficient in this situation, i think it could be argued that the wine being gifted is expected since it happens every year. additionaly, a correct answer choice for these questions would not require you to make any significant assumptions about something being intended to benefit, it would be explicitly said or very strongly implied with a synonym.

i think it boils down to understanding that even if colloquially we might interpret something like "not X unless Y" as to say that if Y happens, X happens, on the LSAT to properly establish that there is a biconditional relationship you would probably see them saying something like "not X unless Y, but otherwise X"

it would be really cool if there was a tag for language drift between premises and conclusion that we could drill

@Emmaaaa this is a good explanation for why taking the contrapositive of the first sentence doesn't work

Something nice with these principle questions is you can IMMEDIATELY eliminate answers like A and D within 2 seconds of looking at the answer choices because the principle tells us about an obligation to do something, but we don't know anything about situations where we should NOT do the thing

@partenr do you follow a path instantaneously?

does it really matter if the behavior is impulsive or not, or rather just that it is similar adult thrill-seeking behavior? I guess so but that's really unsatisfying. What if the behavior is ambiguously impulsive yet conclusively reminiscent of thrill seeking adults

C is wrong because we don't actually care about the emotion difference, we care about the difference in sound. Maybe the parents display lots of emotion with no child present. Still, the psychologists had 80% accuracy. Doesn't really weaken the argument, but rather if true and added to the stimulus would introduce a need to resolve/reconcile/explain it.

E is an instance of of independently strengthening the conclusion (as opposed to eliminating alternative explanations or strengthening the relevance of the evidence) which I've found only rarely enough to make me take a lot of time on this question, but going forward it's good to remember that if you see an answer choice that introduces an invariable causal mechanism that confirms the reason for a correlation found in an observational study, it will likely be the right answer.

poorly written question. A is by far the most relevant but it's still not very vulnerable to criticism on those grounds. as others have said initial fixed costs aren't super relevant to a claim about the "long run"

in my opinion, it is lazy to say that E does not affect the argument. I certainly agree that A "most strengthens" however E strengthens, albeit weakly, by confirming that at least some competitors more than 50% of the time had the same negative rain predictions as our channel. This gives more value to the statement that "most of the time we forecast rain, it rains, and not more than half the time that our competitors predict so, does it rain" because that statement bears little value if we can ALWAYS predict no rain, except maybe once when we're really really confident (like we're in the middle of a hurricane). in that case, my station can always predict no rain, but then predict rain once, and the statement:

"on most of the occasions when we have forecast rain for the next day, we have been right. The same cannot be said for either of our competitors."

would be correct, because they predict rain so rarely, while the other stations may still be not great at predicting, but are still far more useful at predicting "whether it will rain" than our channel that only predicts rain when we're extremely confident.

however, if we know at least some other channels are ALSO employing an approximation of this horrible strategy of extremely conservative rain predictions, then we learn at least sometimes, other stations are no better at predicting a lack of rain, and then there is more value to our channel being very precise at predicting rain.

the explanation states: "It could be that on all the days the station predicted it would not rain its competitors predicted the same—but still, the station has a higher accuracy of predicting rain on the days it rained."

Correct me if i'm wrong, but i believe that the statement "the most important question for viewers in this area is whether it will rain" does not imply that the viewers only care about accurate predictions of rain on the days that it rained. what about accurate predictions of rain on the days it doesn't rain? what about minimizing false positives and false negatives?

I get that the language in E is very weak, however, but my thought process is that it least affects the argument weakly and that for the sake of learning, that explanation could be misleading. Feel free to point out any gaps/inconsistencies/issues in my thought process that you find!!

@SlippinJimmy2026 careful with asking chatgpt for help with LSAT problems, it will often be incorrect

@LeviGrant additionally, we can reference the rules relating to combining some statements. we can conclude that if we have CGOB <-s> /conscious and CGOB->int (AC A), then we can get /conscious <-s> int (the argument's conclusion), by combining the first some statement (reversed) with the relationship stipulated in AC A. however, if we were to try and combine CGOB <-s> /conscious with int->CGOB, we can't do that, since the some statement doesn't tell us anything about the sufficient condition, intelligence. This is how I see it, lmk your thoughts on this approach

something that you can notice on a question like this is that you would never pick B or C here because they have the exact same level of necessity to the argument. They both say the exact same thing about a different element of the conclusion, word for word. so if you're thinking of picking one, just remember you can't pick both because there's only one correct answer choice, so neither are the correct answer! There are a few other situations I've noticed like this that pop up where one answer choice MUST be true if another one of the answer choices is true (but maybe not vice versa) and there's only one correct answer, so you can't pick that one. Just something to be aware of