@raceanu91591 Yeah, I'm starting to wish there as a tag for the sorts of questions that are possible to reason out but only if we ignore reality.

In real life if we're determining if someone was justified in taking an action we're trying to figure out if someone had sufficient reason to take an action when they began it (which was necessarily a time when they didn't know if their action would succeed).

AC E essentially says justification -- whether someone had sufficient reason to begin an action before they knew whether it would succeed -- hangs on whether the action ends up succeeding. So whether you're justified depends on whether you foresaw the unforeseeable.

This is like saying you were justified in bringing an umbrella to the desert on a clear day with no chance of rain because a freak thunderstorm happened. It's insane. You weren't justified, you were lucky.

Questions like this, that operate outside reality, always trip me up.

It seems to me that most LSAT questions are based in reality. Like it'll be a science question asking about a required assumption, and the required assumption will be something technical like "strontium is an alkaline earth metal," which makes sense in the albeit complicated context, AND is actually true.

But then you get one like this where the right answer is total baloney. I tend to forget that baloney answers CAN be right.

@daibikc199 I think not, because the stimulus says "more likely," which is comparative, and can apply even if most people do it.

@ktacklesthelsat I've been having the same thought/question. In my head the answer is "get quicker at everything else, and save time for these, which will continue to take forever."

@ksh9665264 Yeah, bingo, me too. "Many of the children who completed the program [and who had the aforementioned increase in achievement levels reflect in their higher GPAs] subsequently sought membership on a school chess team [now that they were eligible]..." is how I read it.

Didn't occur to me to read it as "Many of the children who completed the program subsequently sought membership [because they liked chess and] on a school chess team that required a high grade average for membership [so they worked hard to raise their GPAs]" is not.

I'm not sure what to learn from this question ... I would like to learn how to see when I'm seeing the wrong one of two possible understandings of an AC, but I don't think I can do that without shooting myself in the foot on other questions.

I suppose I can learn that if I'm confident that a question has zero good answers that there may be another reading of one of the ACs.

I wasted a lot of time on this question. I felt like I could pretty quickly dismiss ACs A-D, and then immediately felt like I could dismiss AC E because we don't have enough information to infer this about most men. I think the key is assuming that all uses of "men" imply "men, generally." I think my motivation against this was that "most" is so often a trigger for logical tests, and it simply wasn't in this case.

What I need to learn from this is that if I can confidently dismiss four answers and the fifth requires a specific interpretation, that may be OK.

@EmmaSmith We don't know that Shayna has no idea about what Daniel would want. Each AC is its own universe. The question stem tells us to assume the principle from the stimulus is valid. It also asks us to evaluate which AC is the one where the principle would be most useful. So we're trying of figure out which of the five AC universes is the universe where the principle is most useful to justify the reasoning. Also, nowhere in the stimulus does it say that Shayna knows that if she does not congratulate Daniel that his feelings will be hurt.

@beyondsudi482 Gotta say I'm with you on this one being HARD. I got it wrong the first time through and I straight-up skipped it on BR because I was COMPLETELY convinced that the question contained an error.

Here's the thought process I had (which I recognize is wrong). The second sentence of the passage is "By 1965, Chávez's United Farm Workers Union gained international recognition by initiating a worldwide boycott of grapes in an effort to get growers in California to sign union contracts." I paraphrase that as "the union was gaining recognition for boycotts, pursuing contracts."

A is about actos, so it's totally irrelevant to unions/contracts

B is about Valdez, irrelevant

C is about Teatro Campesino, irrelevant

D is about theater history, irrelevant

E is about theater history, irrelevant

So at this point I am 100% convinced I misread the question stem. Did it say second sentence of some specific paragraph? No ... (etc.)

Dunno if I'm alone on this.

@ToweringTextbooks A follow up for myself and anyone else who might benefit from it: I was today-years-old when I learned that you can mouse over the little information (i) icon next to the circled question number and find out why the question is marked for BR (including whether you got it wrong, or whether you took a long time, or whether you changed your answer several times, or just left it flagged).

So I think my new personal plan for BR will be to re-attempt each BR-marked question, and then after choosing an answer make sure I didn't choose the same wrong answer as my actual take. If I did choose the same wrong answer, do it again.

@CaleighFreeman I think it's fine if you understand it, and understand the relationship between "It's not the case that everyone enjoys the movies" and "some people do not enjoy the movies," etc.

@businessgoose Though I think I realized where the authors' confusion may have come from. In a few lessons from now we look at negating the statement "All X-Wings have hyperdrives." If we translate that into Lawgic we might say

X -> H

If we negate that we'll get

/(X->H)

Which is "not all X-Wings have Hyperdrives." And this DOES require that there is one X-Wing that does not have a Hyperdrive, which would be X and /H.

But this is a consequence of the English. If the original statement was "All X-Wings must have Hyperdrives" we'd end up with "It is not the case that all X-Wings must have Hyperdrives." This case does NOT require that an X-Wing without a Hyperdrive must exist, but it does allow for the case.

I think there was some early lesson in Foundations in which J.Y. said something like "subset relationships aren't exactly like conditionals, but for the LSAT you don't need to know the difference." This may be true, but I think this example that the 7Sage authors chose may be breaking that rule.

@businessgoose Though /(A->B) IS a logical consequence of the truth of A and /B.

(A and /B) -> /(A->B)

@businessgoose I came by to see if anyone else had said what @brydon125 did. I think @brydon125's point is that /(J->F) does not strictly require that J and /F be true. J and /F is an interesting case, and a possibility for something that could be true under /(J->F), and in a way that's different than under J->F, but J and /F is not a logical consequence of /(J->F), and cannot be assumed.

@melisulusel212 Also confounding is that C makes good causal sense, and D, while valid, doesn't have the same satisfying causal relationship (budgets being met doesn't CAUSE where recyclables go).

@melisulusel212 I had a similar experience. I don't want to spend time diagramming if I can just sniff out a correct answer, which I can usually do. The trick is learning to tell whether my nose is lying. I think you're right to suggest letting the language of the stimulus determine whether to use lawgic. I think C is a terrific bait answer.

When I take a lawgic approach I don't end up with any statement including cost, but I also think it's plausible/intuitive to think cost comparisons could be part of the answer.

I feel like there's some sufficiency/necessity confusion in there for me on this one.

C seems like it's trying to tempt me with implying that a contradiction is false. A contradiction would be implement-requirement > more-trash-in-landfill > more-cost-for-landfill-trash AND cost-for-landfill-trash greater than city-sorting-cost. And C says that's not true.

Yeah, it still feels pretty good to me from an intuition point of view, but as soon as I follow the lawgic it vanishes. Interesting.

But perhaps this is all because I lack practice. When I read the stimulus I did get the feeling that the part about cost wasn't part of the logical chain. Maybe the lesson is to flag that as potential red-herring material.

@CaleighFreeman The exercise suggests you do for sake of practice. You don't need to do it on test day.

@Isra Remember that it is not about which specific case happens, it's about which cases satisfy the condition. On 7Sage airlines the inflight refreshment must include pretzels or cola. If they offer pretzels and cola that's OK (because it's part of inclusive or). But it's also OK if they offer pretzels and skip the cola, or cola without pretzels. That's the difference between the OR case and the AND case.

In your example if both Bill and Mary are adopted that would satisfy both the AND case and the [inclusive] OR case. But that doesn't tell you about the conditional statement.

Back to our imaginary airline, if you're aboard and you receive pretzels and cola that doesn't tell you that the policy is that they must serve pretzels AND cola, or pretzels OR cola, or even if they have a refreshment policy at all.

@ToweringTextbooks This link was useful to me: https://7sage.com/blog/why-is-or-so-confusing, which says "Context will tell you which meaning is intended and let me save you a lot of trouble and tell you right now that the meaning that the LSAT summons most often is 'and/or.'"

@IsaacNyberg I agree that English is ambiguous, and that both interpretations (the interpretation /N or /O and the interpretation /(N or O)) are valid interpretations in English. I take it that an unspoken message of this lesson is that the LSAT will use only the /N or /O interpretation unless context makes it very clear otherwise. The toy examples I came up with are as follows.

"If Nancy or Oliver is not adopted, then we will be sad that the one unadopted orphan has no family."

"We have adopted no gases for approved use in the laboratory and we will adopt zero or one gases today. The only gases we can adopt are Nitrogen or Oxygen. If Nitrogen or Oxygen is not adopted, then we will not have adopted a gas for use in the laboratory."

@ToweringTextbooks OK, I found my concrete answer in the lesson called "Conditionals without Indicators." That lesson introduces an as-yet-unseen pseudo-indicator (the word "guarantees"). Of the strategy of simply adding "guarantees" to Group 2, and memorizing this new member, the lesson says "I wouldn't recommend that strategy. The reason is because it creates an illusion that you can master conditional logic by simply memorizing words in a list." Case closed: the goal is not simply to memorize.

@ToweringTextbooks OK, double-nope (which is a double negative, so we're back to yup). Later in that same next lesson it says "Ultimately, you’ll get to a point where you read that statement and quickly know ..."

So maybe 7Sage is suggesting we memorize the words in the short term as a way of gaining fluency, but that when we arrive at the desired final understanding we won't need those group lists anymore.

@ToweringTextbooks Nope ... the very next lesson is a "you try" situation where the lesson expects me to have memorized which group the word "unless" is in. So yes, now I DO think 7Sage recommends we memorize these groups. (edit: keep reading this thread to find that 7Sage does NOT think memorization is the goal)

I feel like this kinda answers a question I've been sitting on, which is whether 7Sage suggests we straight-up memorize the words in the four groups of conditional indicators (Group 1: if, when, where, all, every, any, the only; Group 2: only, only if, only when, only where, always, must; etc.). It seems now like the answer is no, since we won't be diagramming during the test (except for one or two questions per section). It seems like 7Sage does want us confidently understand the relationship between those conditional indicators and the underlying logic, but not through rote memorization (or at least not necessarily through rote memorization).

@jyun Hmm... Interesting. I didn't watch the video but the text lesson seems to disagree with you, saying "in order to" is an indicator for a sufficient condition. Interesting that the lesson doesn't mention the presence of "must."

@lsatdiva12345 Said differently, the logical notions built into the group 3 and group 4 rules are descriptions of how English uses these sets of logical indicator words (at least in the context of LSAT questions).