For posterity, I think it is fine to spend extra time than what is target for some questions. There are questions that have taken me >4 minutes on an actual PT, yet I still finished the LR section with time to spare.

It's about your average, not making sure you're around target for every section. For many questions, I am 10-30 seconds quicker than target, which allows me to spend an extra 2 minutes on a few of the ones I personally find difficult without issue.

Question 8 kinda makes sense tbh. I got it wrong but damn I should've chosen C.

I put A initially, but I thought it was just stupid, because if the electric cars that people are mainly driving are in urban areas, then isn't all the pollution because of the cars they drive considered urban pollution, even though the pollution isn't literally in the city? Would we really call that rural pollution?

I thought it was just a dumb semantical trap, but no, I guess it's the answer. Great.

"Errmmm, akshually the pollution would be done in poor areas, not the cities, therefore it does not cause urban pollution, checkmate!!!" How stupid.

Gilman has a specific version of Social Darwinism, that cannot be challenged, and if she has a specific version of it, then Social Darwinism is the general type. E should be correct. An introduction to social Darwinism was given in the end of the first and beginning of the second paragraph.

The fact the score averages for answering B and E are about the same is another piece of evidence. If the answer was B and not E we would see higher scorers who did well on the test to pick B at much higher rates, which didn't happen. Both are valid answers.

I've never seen an LSAT question with this number of comments before... and I have to agree. I don't get how I'm supposed to infer information about Ancient Greece from an ancient Greek play. Also, the answer choice seems like it's saying people GENERALLY do this, and not a absolutely zero people read aloud. C is tricky because "on-stage action" is a confusing statement that could be interpreted as being false.

This was my exact thought process as well.

Every so often I'll come across a 2-difficulty question that, for some reason, feels like I'm trying to crack the Da Vinci Code. Clearly, brains are just different.

The stimulus made it seem like the lawyer was hinting at the witness lying, so I was expecting an answer like that, and E was the only one that seemed like what I was expecting. It just didn't feel right though, so I changed it to D after 15 seconds, and then kept it there for another 40 seconds while I racked my brain around wtf I was reading. I had to evolve mid-question, and gosh darn does it feels good.

I chose C for a similar reason, but the reason it's wrong I guess is because we would specifically learn that CHESS does not require thinking, which would I guess teach us something about human intelligence.

But it's not unreasonable at all. We're told that a campaign could possibly save the product, therefore we should try it. The argument is bad because it assumes that just because the chance to save it is above zero, that it must be the correct thing to do, but it doesn't take into account other factors.

Besides, B is just terrible. So what if many fail? You haven't given a reason why we wouldn't do the campaign anyway even if it isn't 100% success rate. The implication was that it wasn't a 100% success rate strategy anyway, so B does nothing. For B to work you'd have to assume other things, such as a cost/benefit analysis type of thing and concluding that it isn't worth it to advertise because the chance of failure is too high, but that is just D but worse, since D doesn't need an assumption for that to work, it literally tells us the company would fail, which is obviously bad.

We're asked to choose the one that's most supported by the stimulus. If I said that all birds are blue in the stimulus, and one of the answers said that some birds are blue, then that would be very well supported by the stimulus, since it MUST be true that some birds are blue if every bird is blue. It's very well supported even though the answer itself is weaker than what is supported in the stimulus.

With strong support, you can always make a weaker conclusion.

No problem. I hope I can replicate my best self on test day as well! lol

The first 2 chains make sense. It's saying investment is required and then the next one says this other thing is required for investment. The last part of the stimulus is not in this chain.

It just doesn't make sense when I read it, and that's on purpose. Since it makes no sense, I understand that the thing missing is connecting the premises to it, which D does. Sorry if I can't explain it well, but practice definitely helps see it easier.

The argument relies on the absence of evidence proving that tire tread DOESN'T harm it. Basically saying they haven't proven the negative.

The author never specifically said what was wrong with over or under inflated tires (which is C), but this isn't the flaw in the argument. Reason being, is that the flaw is the thing I said above. Also, it's not the flaw because citing the specific reason isn't necessary for the argument. Let's say he instead said that over inflated tires are bad because this study conducted concluded they were bad. That would be a perfectly fine argument, yet the author did not specify how exactly this is the case, he simply appealed to the study.

I almost chose C as well, so I will say this is a super hard question considering it's only rated 2 stars.

The explanation was not bad, because E didn't warrant an in-depth explanation of everything wrong with it. The average score of people who chose it was 149 and it was 1%, so it's clearly not a very convincing wrong answer. His explanation is sufficient.

So has a very weak necessary condition like A ever been the correct answer, or is it just never correct in a strengthen question like this? I feel as though it's correct sometimes (I could be wrong), and if so, it's hard to easily rule it out when B has some assumptions to make for it to work.

Q12

I'm a little upset because I felt there is a significant difference between not needing any specific verbal context vs not needing a verbal context.

The former I assumed means you obviously still need some type of verbal context, like literally any, but it's still needed, whereas that answer choice seems to say you don't need a verbal context.

I guess it's still pretty good even with that problem and I should've chosen it. My brain thought it was a trap answer.

3 years old so this won't help you, but for anyone reading this, as someone who's PT'ed 174 multiple times, it's mostly intuitive understanding to see the gap.

When I read this, I read some parts again and felt the argument was trying to make the assumption that collective goals lead (-->) to no confidence. A high scorer should be able to read this argument and see the gap. Some conditional logic heavy questions might take a few minutes if it's a super confusing one, but this one wasn't one of those.

Didn't even catch the difference between commercial flights and flying in general, which is important because there are some questions which hinge on you needing to see the distinction between two similar concepts.

Got it right off intuition and feelings rather than a concrete reason.

Yes, but the answer says no known natural cause would account for 8 METEORITE craters. But volcanoes wouldn't produce meteorite craters, so it excludes the possibility of it being a meteor, thereby making it almost certain it's from a volcano.

I think B is wrong because it implies that testing for engine wear alone is a reliable gauge of quality, because of the word "also". So it doesn't challenge or do anything.

I actually thought augment just meant change instead of increase, which made me take longer than I should have on this one.

There would still be a correlation between two things even if they're both caused by a third thing. Correlation does not imply causation.

Totally just glossed over the "comparable number of items" part. I really gotta slow down and read carefully...

"Different corporations have different core corporate philosophies."

So even if it doesn't say "all" here, we are to assume it means all? I think I need to read a logic textbook or something.

Damn I got the tough ones right but messed up on the MP. I get that it doesn't mention social factors in particular, but wow E seemed too specific.