Hi Teresa, one piece of advice is that I personally found The Loophole's basic translation drill (which later gets built into the CLIR drill) really helpful. It significantly improved my timing and comprehension of the stimulus in LR. You can start doing this drill as soon as you're familiar with the grammar, logic, and argument structures that you learn either in 7Sage's foundations curriculum or in the earlier chapters of The Loophole's curriculum. For what it's worth, I think 7Sage's foundations curriculum is more thorough than The Loophole's is, and so better if you're a beginner.

You'll find that 7Sage and The Loophole's approaches to LR differ beyond that. 7Sage has a detailed taxonomy of different question types (SA, NA, PSA, WSE, flaw, pattern, etc.) whereas The Loophole teaches that there are 4 different stimulus types and emphasizes reading the stim and predicting the answer. It depends which one you like more! I personally found The Loophole's version more intuitive, but I also wasn't a total beginner when I started the LSAT. By the way, 7Sage also has a fantastic analytics feature which is extremely helpful once you start practicing.

I don't get why B is correct given that the conclusion is disjunctive. I'll explain my thinking:

According to B "it is not much easier today to domesticate wild large mammal species [WLMS] than it was in the past." Okay. Let's negate this: "it is much easier today to domesticate WLMS that it was in the past."

If B is the right answer then this negated statement should be incompatible with the argument. But it's not.

Here's the conclusion: "most WLMS in existence today would either be [1] difficult to domesticate or [2] would not be worth domesticating." This is a disjunction. A disjunction is false when and only when both disjuncts are false. So our conclusion is true so long as [1] is true, or [2] is true, or [1] and [2] are both true.

the negated-B tells us that [1] is false. It states that it's not difficult to domesticate the WLMS in existence today after all, or it at least tells us that domesticating these animals is much easier than it was before.

So [1] is false. WLMS aren't that difficult to domesticate. But this doesn't "wreck" the conclusion! For—as a disjunction—the conclusion can still be true, provided that the other disjunct, [2], is true. In other words, the conclusion can still be true provided that the WLMS in existence today are not worth domesticating.

Negated-B doesn't seem to wreck anything else about the argument either. I do think it's the least-bad answer choice. But I don't see how it's a necessary assumption. Can someone please explain!?

Typo: I meant to say D, not E.

@Holly Shulman But there is an answer choice that says something along the lines of 'witness' confidence levels matter to police officers,' no? E: "Police officers are more interested in the confidence witnesses have when testifying than in the accuracy of that testimony."

@SuperSyFy The thing is, the stim says "Hagerle owes me a sincere apology as well," which really sounds like its saying that the physician was owed that apology. And if she was owed it, then (like you say) one person is owed an apology, so both are.

C being correct over B depends on reading the stim in a way where it doesn't claim that the physician was owed an apology. I'm interested in what other people think though.

In the end I chose D but doesn't C seem like a potential explanation too? Maybe the news station aired more interviews with people against the new freeway because those people gave more emotional interviews, which made for better TV. So C does weaken the argument. However, D is right because it weakens the argument more.

@embino On second thought it's a valid inference because "not all A are B" is equivalent to "some A are not B" and so implies it.

Can we really infer from ~[ALL X-WINGS HAVE HYPERDRIVES] to [SOME X-WINGS DON'T HAVE HYPERDRIVES]? The former statement says having a hyperdrive isn't a necessary condition for something to be an x-wing. But the latter statement says there exists some x-wing without a hyperdrive. In other words, we're inferring the existence of hyperdrive-less x-wings from a statement which is silent on whether or not they exist.

@jdubdtrey Hey, I've done some logic so I can answer. First, (X&Y) on its own isn't a necessary condition. It simply means "X and Y," given that the symbol & means "and." (Trivia: logicians call "and" statements "conjunctions," just as they call "if/then" statements "conditionals.")

Second, there is something called De Morgan's Law, which tells us that negation of (X&Y) is logically equivalent to (not-X or not-Y). I think you're referring to this. Now I think I can answer your question, because you asked about the contrapositive. Suppose you had the following conditional:

P → (X&Y)

You could take the contrapositive:

~(X&Y) → ~P

And now we have a negated conjunction! So we can apply De Morgan's Law:

(~X or ~Y) → ~P

All three of these statements are equivalent. In other words, a sentence like "if it rains, it's cold and wet" is equivalent to "if it's not-[cold and wet], then it didn't rain" is equivalent to "if it's not cold or not wet, then it didn't rain."

It's probably worth noting that De Morgan's Law isn't a magic bullet. Sometimes it just makes things more complicated. But it can also come in handy, to wrangle statements into a different but equivalent form which we feel more comfortable working with.

@achois1025 It's a true statement. It's not a negation ... the negation would be "not-[everything is a potato or not a potato]." It's not valid ... that's a misnomer because validity is only a property of arguments. But it is true. In fact, it can't be false!

@11tristanseguin FNV reference!

@milank2711 One way to think about it might be that "A if B" is has a different meaning than "A because B." For example, saying "if it rained then the sidewalk is wet" doesn't imply that the sidewalk is wet because it rained. For example, imagine it's an indoor sidewalk, but whenever it rains a man dumps a bucket of water on it. In this case it's true that if it rains, the sidewalk it wet. Yet it's false that it's wet because of the rain ... on the contrary, it's wet because of the man.

@Simon Navarrete edit at the end: "than to" raccoons.

I keep doing the questions with "than to," differently from JY but I think it's equivalent. For example, "scientists have found that giant pandas are more similar genetically to bears than to raccoons." Here is JY's answer:

Bears vs. Raccoons

Which is a giant panda genetically more similar to?

Winner: Bears

But I did it this way:

Pandas vs. Racoons

Which more similar to bears

Pandas

I think these are equivalent, because they both say Pandas are more similar to bears than Raccoons.

I think both ways work.

@clairebear22 I think it's fine. The subject of the sentence is "elephants." Of elephants, we're predicating: they feed more in the summer than in the winter. So it makes sense to consider two sets of elephants:

1. Elephants in the summer.

2. Elephants in the winter.

Then we ask: which set of elephants feeds more? And the original sentence tells us that the answer is (1) elephants in the summer. At least, that's my take, because I naturally thought about it the same way you did

For question 5, analyzing the object clause:

"it [the bakery] can't continue to bake its traditional bread and switches to a recipe that uses cornmeal."

Yields

1. The bakery can't continue to bake its traditional bread.

2. The bakery switches to a recipe that uses cornmeal.

The two sentences are linked by "and," which in this context suggests that (1) causes (2). But isn't this a somewhat misleading analysis? Look at the whole sentence:

"A bakery in a region facing wheat shortage realizes that it can't continue to bake its traditional bread and switches to a recipe that uses cornmeal."

The fact that the bakery can't continue to bake its traditional bread isn't per se what causes it to switch up the recipe. Rather, it's the bakery realizing this fact.

Maybe the solution is that this fact and the bakery realizing so are related, and both play a causal role in bringing about (2). But my takeaway from this is that it's a reminder not to ignore the rest of the sentence when faced with a complex object clause.

@jayprev97 And it's a tricky referent, because "that" could refer to the belief some people have about mammals, or the content of said belief. You need to use context clues from the rest of the stim to choose the likelier option.

@KedronKnight I agree, that was tricky. I think one could definitely make a case for your interpretation—especially if the last sentence said something like "therefore, editorialists who want attention shouldn't criticize personal attacks by politicians."

As things are, I said "them" referred to the attacks because that seemed like a more plausible reading to me given the comma and last sentence. Still, I agree the sentence is ambiguous.

Similar questions to others:

In question 3, "Mary Simms ... declared, 'Billboards are the basis of our business,'" the phrase "'Billboards are the basis of our business'" is identified as the object of "declared."

But in question 4, a "study ... concluded that there is a definite relationship between X and Y," the phrase "there is a definite relationship between X and Y" is identified as a modifier of "concluded."

Why? Surely it's not because the word "that" appears in 4 but not 3. Of course, we learned that "that" signals a modifier, but the word "that" could easily be included in 3, e.g., "Mary Simms ... declared [that] 'Billboards are the basis of our business.'"

@arieladelman322 I had the same question and your response is super helpful! The cat likes drinking milk, as opposed to simply liking milk.

This also makes me realize realize that the fact that the cat likes to drink milk doesn't imply it likes milk, justas the fact that Sue likes to kill mosquitoes doesn't imply that she likes mosquitoes.

@aliegeaksu imagine you asked the speaker to justify why they've chosen to go ahead with the operation. "Well," they say, "with my current medical condition, there may not be another alternative." Here, the speaker is giving you a reason why he's decided to go ahead with the operation.

Now consider "I've decided to go ahead with the operation" as a conclusion. What're the reasons for it? Same deal: the reason is that "with my current medical condition, there may not be another alternative." Thus, it looks like we've got two statements, one which supports the other. That's an argument!

My college logic class defined arguments differently from JY, a set of premises and a conclusion. For example, even something like [premise: it's raining or not raining] + [conclusion: Massachusetts is in the USA] counts as an argument under the definition of my logic class.

The above wouldn't count as an argument for JY, because "it's raining or not raining" doesn't support (increase the likelihood of the truth of) "Massachusetts is in the USA." So, JY has a more restrictive definition of arguments than my logic class did. Just thought that was interesting.