@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.

@Ikaarin 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).

@lsatdiva12345 Remember that the rules aren't any fundamental information about the logic, they're just shortcuts that help you jot down a lawgic implication correctly when you see one of the logical indicator words. The point of the rules is that in group 3 the sufficient condition is negated, and in group 4 the necessary condition is negated. Maybe it would be a good illustration if you built your own implications in the group-3 and group-4 patterns (/A -> B, and A -> /B), and then translated them into English. You will likely find that the words you need to use for the group 3 pattern are words like or, unless, until, without, and that you'll need no, none, not both, cannot for group 4.

@ToweringTextbooks Ahh, I made it through a few more lessons, and I see that these often add other examples like Garfield ⊂ cats ⊂ mammals. Thanks for this! I would welcome adding this example to the pages that include the Star Wars example.

#feedback I wonder if Jedi/Force is the most comprehensible subset and superset that we could pick for these lessons. I grant that Star Wars has significant cultural traction. As I try to commit his to memory (particularly whether it's J -> F or F -> J) I find myself wondering "wait ... are there other non-Jedi force users? Are the Sith bad guys technically Jedi, but just an evil type of Jedi? Does every Jedi necessarily use the force?" I realize that you may have stipulated already in a previous lesson that all Jedi use the force, but this is new material to us, and we're trying to remember. I wonder if the relationships would be more transparent with some other more blatant example, like maple ⊂ trees ⊂ plants, or Lassie ⊂ dogs ⊂ mammals. At least some of us are inclined to lose track of the subset/superset relationship between Jedi and force users, but I think literally everyone on 7Sage knows maple ⊂ trees ⊂ plants.

I assume that this question is the rare LSAT question that was flawed on test day (perhaps it had other than exactly one correct answer), and was not used in the calculation of test takers' scores.

I hope this isn't a silly question, but I took PT138 as a PrepTest. I have to presume that the actual stats for my performance will be based on the performance of test takers who DID take some nonsense question in this position on the test.

Should this affect how I view my score on this PrepTest?

#feedback I also wonder if the 7Sage UI should encourage students to use this section only for drills, since as a section or a PrepTest it's kind of poisoned by this question. I say it's poisoned because when I take this PrepTest I spend much less time on this question than the actual test-takers did.

Maybe a way to do this would be to tag that question as not "fresh." I selected this test to use as a PT because it showed as 100% fresh for me.

@yanisavara It's on the analytics page. I scrolled through my PrepTests and found one I had taken already. I clicked "Results" and it shows me the four sections labeled like this:

S1 · LR S2 · LR S3 · LR (EXP) S4 · RC

So that shows me that S3 was the experimental section for the PrepTest I took.

@okbo3141 I shared some thoughts above that I think touch on what you're looking for. Repeated here:

It is not possible for every dance to appeal to a wide audience. There will never be 1000 popular dances. People only have attention for so many. If each person likes, say, only three dances, and the cakewalk is in everyone's top three because of the socioeconomic flux, then that environment was especially favorable for the cakewalk's success.

As I see it the thesis of the third paragraph is set by the first sentence: that the cakewalk's complex evolution is what let it attract a wide audience. This thesis is supported by the second/last sentence: amid the socioeconomic flux of the era, an art form had to have broad appeal to appeal to a wide audience. If we consider success to be attracting/appealing to a wide audience, and if we infer that other art forms ("simple cultural phenomena") lacked this (which seems likely if the cakewalk's evolution was "complex"), then this was an environment in which only something like the cakewalk COULD succeed.

Or maybe think of it like a sieve. Through a sieve isn't the easiest way for sand to fall, but in a world where mixed-size rock grains are falling through a sieve, the conditions are right for sand grains to be a big deal once the sifting is done.

Or maybe just think of it as relative success. It is not possible for every dance to appeal to a wide audience. There will never be 1000 popular dances. People only have attention for so many. If each person likes, say, only three dances, and the cakewalk is in everyone's top three because of the socioeconomic flux, then that environment was especially favorable for the cakewalk's success.