If E said psychological factors, it would have been the wrong AC BECAUSE it would confirm that psychological factors cause permanently high blood pressure which causes heart disease.

The stimulus is saying easily angered is correlated with permanently high blood pressure and then permanently high blood pressure causes heart disease, so psychological factors cause heart disease. So it's saying being easily angered can cause heart disease.

Again, this means that if E said psychological factors, it would be the wrong AC BECAUSE even though it's saying psychological factors cause high blood pressure & make people quick to anger INDEPENDENTLY, this still confirms the conclusion that psychological factors cause heart disease because permanently high blood pressure causes heart disease and being easily angered raises blood pressure even more.

This is an important distinction for a weakener.

Im still learning but what has really helped it click is using chat gpt. Show it a hard question and then explain your thinking to him. Use the words sufficient and necessary. Let it walk through the question for you.

Also search on Google necessary / sufficient quiz. There’s like 3 from random science website unrelated to the lsat but have a few questions that are relevant.

Lastly, try to fill in the assumption gap before you look at the answer choices.

Am I allowed to just say that the stimulus is 1 some + 1 all = 1 some

and B is the only one that does that?

so if there's 100 cat households, 47 of people with cats hold a degree. if there's 1000 dog households, 380 of people with dogs hold a degree.

BUT, the conclusion states that for anyone who holds a degree, then they are more likely to have a cat than a dog BUT then there's 380+47 = 427, 380 of them come from dog households so dog households are more likely.

It's flipping animal -> degree to degree -> animal.

I got it wrong in the Actual & BR but after reading this makes sense and I'll try to make it super clear:

The flaw is obvious, why can't technology innovation motivated by personal gain serve society as whole?

(D) is the only one addressing the flaw: "The argument is assuming that developing technology is unlikely to serve society as a whole unless it's motivated to do so".

I put (A) initially, which is too strong.

Then I put (C) which is similar to (D) by saying that they do not result in personal gain and maybe they resulted in benefits to society.

I think those that chose (B) are getting almost too much in the weeds of the questions and not thinking high-level enough. I'm early into my studying so please correct me. Thanks!

My take:

We are told that there is a positive correlation between improving composition skills and learning to write letters the most automatically.

So, we know there's a correlation, but the argument is saying there's a Cause and Effect. Producing more characters causes mental resources which causes improved composition skills.

When we see this, the best answer choice will strengthen the cause and effect. We want to something that allows us to believe the cause and effect is true the most. This means something that removes an alternative cause for the effect or something that strengthens the correlation.

A. Isn't strengthening the cause and effect or correlation. It is bringing up a new concept of practicing the helps them write more letters. It doesn't talk about freeing up mental resources / improving composition skills.

B. is saying that if you knew how to write letters before, then you could improve even more after the lessons. We want something stronger. If anything, this is adding an alternative reason to an improved composition skills.

D. is a decent answer choice. It is trying to strengthen by saying that the cause and effect in the conclusion can be made because the observed correlation is representative. Keep it.

E. This is similar to B.

C. strengthens the conclusion the best because it takes the correlation further down the timeline. We know now that we continued to see the correlation as the lessons progressed. The cause and effect is even more so valid now.

Compare C to D, C wins. There is not enough doubt in the stimulus to highlight that the observed correlation was not representative. We need to make a big assumption to think that the conclusion is applying to every first-grader. I see why people click it but C is just cleaner and focuses on the correlation.

Compare C to B, C wins. B just now looks even weaker. It's talking about a smaller subset of people to prove the correlation (students who wrote letters better before the lessons).

It's a strengthen, so we should ask ourselves "so what?". Answer choice C gives us the most reason to believe that the cause and effect is true.

Hey Everyone - doesn't A concede that the joke could be someone else? A says: "It could be both Miller AND someone else". Isn't it wrong to agree that it's someone else?

This one is an interesting learning lesson. Here's a better way to say it:

Premise: If you run and jump, you will cross the river.

Conclusion: You will not cross the river because you didn't jump.

But because the contrapositive becomes an OR, if you did not cross the river, you could have not jumped OR not run OR both.

So in order to simply state that you didn't cross because you didn't jump, we need to fill the gap to ensure jumping was the reason and eliminate that it wasn't running.

The only way to do that is to say that you ran! So as long as you jump, you run. So if you didn't run, you didn't jump.

You will not cross the river because you didn't run, and because you didn't run, you didn't jump.

This is a question that really forces you to understand your understanding of conditional logic. It's an interesting one.

What you need to know for CL:

- understanding the order of sufficient and necessary

- understanding what you can do with it (contrapositive)

- understanding why you can use the contrapositive

- understanding what you can not do with it (only negate, only flip, partial contrapositive, partial negate)

- understanding why you can't do those things above

This question is about the last one. So the intermediary conclusion states that "the press agent did not tell every reporter everything about the accident." Now, this is the negation of the first sufficient condition, "if the press agent told every reporter everything about the accident,".

Then the conclusion "It follows that some reporter can scoop all of the other reporters."

The issue here is that when you negate the sufficient condition, you can't do anything with that! The conditional rule cannot activate, because sufficient conditions trigger, and necessary conditions require a trigger. Since nothing triggered the chain, we can't draw any inference and the chain dies.

Now, the flaw here is the conclusion like I stated before. It's a flaw because it's drawing an inference from the negated sufficient condition. The question itself is tricky, but it's basically asking: "What inference can we logically draw from the chain that proves that we can't negate the sufficient condition to draw this flawed conclusion?"

For example:

"If it rains, the ground is wet"

"It did not rain, so the ground is not wet"

The second statement is flawed because even if it did not rain, the ground can be wet from a sprinkler, a hose, a fire hydrant, etc.

Well, we are told initially (the logical chain):

Told Everyone Everything -> Cannot Scoop

Then, the conclusion is trying to say:

Not Told Everyone Everything -> Can Scoop

So, not telling everyone doesn't guarantee we can scoop because... now think... well because why does not telling everyone mean you can scoop? What if everyone knows the same thing but it's not everything? Everyone is on the same playing field still even if you did not tell everyone everything.

We are looking for what could be the case that proves that the statement is flawed. How the negated necessary condition cannot be triggered by the negated sufficient condition.

ACs:

A - This still opens up the possibility that they can scoop.

B - Doesn't follow any logical chain. "need not"

C - Doesn't follow any logical chain. Would be trickier if it was a NA question.

D - Doesn't follow any logical chain.

E - This puts every reporter on the even playing field.

Interested!

Hey I'm down