@Anthony.pardella@gmail.com The steak/cod example explicitly tells you that it's exclusive. "You must eat either the steak or the cod, but not both." The point they're trying to make is that you should assume the LSAT writers are intending the inclusive meaning of "or", unless there is some part of the stimulus that confirms otherwise. Or, in the case of sitting at the table, it's literally impossible by the laws of time and space for it to be both.

I hate that I got this wrong by forgetting to put a slash through one of my conditions when negating. So that when I went back to link chains in my diagram, I linked them in the wrong order, inadvertently confusing the sufficient for the necessary. I did the hard part, which was identifying the sufficient/necessary conditions, but a mechanical error screwed me up. NEVER AGAIN.

@kazuhiro35 I recommend doing a re-watch of all the conditional logic videos up to this point. Because I felt that way too for a long time until I really drilled the concepts into my brain. When you keep repeating the concepts and explaining to yourself how the concepts work, eventually it becomes intuition. It's a slow learning curve, but you do get there with a lot of practice.

I also recommend sitting with a sentence until you do understand exactly what the sentence is saying. I honestly find it so annoying to have to have to approach it this way, but it's the only way that's getting me results. Do not look at the clock and judge yourself for how slow you may be going. The speed comes way farther down the road.

I appreciate how you guys keep thinking of ways to keep the info fresh and engaging!

I'm thinking about the term "scorching hot" as an example.

The opposite of "scorching hot" would be "freezing cold".

The negation of "scorching hot" would be "not scorching hot".

"Not scorching hot", though it could mean "freezing cold", it could also mean "warm".

Opposition and negation do not ask you to do the same thing. By accidentally interpreting the word "negation" to mean "opposition", you will accidentally miss out on a spectrum of meanings for a negated word.

It took me a REALLY long time to think this through:

Being in Los Angeles (subset) is sufficient to know you're in California (superset), but being in Los Angeles (subset) is not necessary for knowing you're in California (superset). You don't necessarily need to know that you're in Los Angeles in order to know you're in California; you could be in San Diego, Sacramento, or San Jose. As long as you are in California, it's not necessary to know WHERE EXACTLY you are in California, in order to know you're already in California.

Let's say the border of California was equipped with a high-tech alarm system that would blare sirens and absolutely let you know that you walked into the ocean/Oregon/Nevada/Arizona. And let's say you were blind-folded, dropped into the center of California, and told to walk around randomly in any direction for 3 hours. At the end of those 3 hours, you stop walking, and you know for a fact that the alarm never went off during your 3 hour walk. You know you never left California because the sirens never blared. So you have to KNOW you're in California, even though you have no clue what part of the state you're in. Are you north? Are you south? Doesn't matter. That's what it means by: "subset membership is not necessary for superset membership". Knowing you're in Los Angeles is not necessary for knowing you're in California.

I've gone back and forth studying the basics of conditionals, and I don't think its ever been as clear for me until just now by visualizing the small circle in the big circle. I'm just now understanding why a contrapositive makes sense inherently: if you're not in the big circle at all, you can't be in the small circle either. sigh. Things I wish I understood earlier :/

@BenjaminMcDaniel Question 4:

"No statistical evidence is provided to show that humans act selfishly more often than they act unselfishly."

Let's ignore the first bit because the comparison starts after the word "that". Let's call this bolded part of the sentence the "phenomenon":

No statistical evidence is provided to show that humans act selfishly more often than they act unselfishly.

Let's say selfishly = A, and then unselfishly = B. That gets us to the following:

Humans act A --more often-- than they act B.

Our re-write of the phenomenon becomes:

Humans act B --less often-- than they act A.

___________________________________________________

So, these two phenomena mean the exact same thing:

1. Humans act selfishly more often than they act unselfishly.

2. Humans act unselfishly less often than they act selfishly.

___________________________________________________

NOW, let's instead focus on the rest of the sentence (and ignore the phenomenon we just looked at above):

No statistical evidence is provided to show that [phenomenon].

This bolded part of the sentence is saying that the phenomenon (the part that is stricken through) does not have any evidence provided. It doesn't mean the phenomenon is true or false. It is just saying we don't currently have the support to prove the phenomenon.

Note to self:

"People with perfect pitch are not more likely than others to make sure that their children receive musical training."

If this was a real sentence in an LSAT problem, I would instantly interpret it to mean that neither perfect-pitch parents nor non-perfect-pitch parents would have any more likelihood of getting their child involved in musical training. But this sentence leaves the possibility open that non-perfect-pitch parents could be more likely to secure the training.

You would need more context from other sentences in the text to make this determination.

@Cee🦋 This is how I think about it:

Some cultivars of corn (big corn) are much more closely related morphologically to sorghum (big sorghum) than to most other cultivars of corn (tiny tiny tiny corn).

In this case, "big corn" is more related to "big sorghum" because they are both big. But there's also other kinds of corn that are "tiny tiny tiny corn". Even though the "big corn" and the "tiny tiny tiny corn" are both kinds of corn, the sentence is telling us that "big corn" and "big sorghum" are more similar because they are both big.

The sentence is telling us that it is more important that 2 things are big ("big corn" and "big sorghum") than the fact that 2 things are corn ("big corn" and "tiny tiny tiny corn").

@hngraham05 I personally just ignore the word, if it's a totally foreign word that I don't recognize. I just continue reading to see if the text will give me more context.

@ChinasaGrant I think the purpose of these exercises is to understand what to expect with the structure of complex sentences across the LSAT. You won't need to actively identify the types of clauses (or their names), but if you don't know how complex sentences are structured, you won't be able to read efficiently in a time-sensitive scenario. I don't think learning the grammar terminology is the point of these videos. I think the point is to get comfortable with quickly recognizing the relationships between clauses and sentences.

@AaronMiller2003 I've been watching the videos first, then taking notes on only things I didn't understand. I don't take any notes on things I already intuitively understand.

@ArianaVerner It is not cause/effect. Just because one predicate came first in a sentence before a second predicate does not make it more important/consequential than the second predicate.

@hataie I don't even think it's "wrong" either way to think of it as "the most successful novels" or just "novels". This sort of sentence defines itself -- you could essentially re-write the sentence as: "The most successful novels have narrative suspense and character development." But the LSAT is obnoxious and will write a sentence extra strangely just to be annoying.

OOOOOH, I am so thankful for this lesson. I have been studying for the LSAT for about a year now, and didn't even realize I was making this mistake until just now.

For question 2, I thought "their" refers to only "most consumers". It actually refers to the whole phrase---"most consumers of lemon soda". Paying attention to the modifier is so important. "Most consumers" is NOT the same thing as "most consumers of lemon soda". This refers to 2 different groups of people! "Most consumers of lemon soda" is a subset of "most consumers".

Yay!

@Okknicoleee Think of the object as receiving (or being directly impacted by) the subject's action. Birds catch worms. Bird is the subject, catch is the action (verb), and worm is the object. It's important to make this distinction because it's the bird doing the catching. It's not the worm that is catching the bird.

A subject of a sentence is the "do-er", the object is the thing that gets "acted on".

Alfred Wegener developed the concept. "Alfred" is the subject, while "concept" is the object. Alfred is the one who is doing, the concept is the thing being acted on. Notice: the concept did NOT develop Alfred Wegener.

@KhushyMandania This thought isn't wrong necessarily. The attempt "to sabotage" is still a type of "attempt". "Attempt to sabotage" is a simple phrase, but cutting out the "to sabotage" part makes it EVEN simpler.

@hd9764 Ehhh, I don't think that's the takeaway. I think the point is that the modifiers further limits the purpose/scope of a sentence. We should be paying attention to the exact terms in a sentence. The sentence "Cats sing" means something different than "Fat orange cats sing".

@Jresen It's a rule premise. In the world of this Disney problem, premise 3 is an established rule that we are to take as fact for that universe. It's not an intermediate conclusion because it's not a sentence that is concluding anything.

@osaieh Same! I kept wondering what I was misreading because I wasn't understanding where Logichut was coming from.

@BrigidCarlin Maybe I'm wrong about this, but I've always thought of the word "many" as a fancy "some". There is no exact meaning of the word "many", and since there is no hard and fast rule about it, I never feel comfortable assuming that "many" indicates "most".  Many people throughout the world like playing badminton (as in, a significant number of people), but you couldn't say that most (51% of) people in the world like playing badminton.  I think of "some" and "many" as proportion words, whereas "many" is a magnitude word.

@SihanFan I was able to view E as wrong because of the phrase "they should be employed" in and of itself - I don't see the author taking that conclusively positive stance anywhere in the passage. There's an implication in answer choice E that the author must believe that farming is necessarily better than ocean fishing. Rather, the author is saying: "fish farming could work, but it also might not", which isn't a position of advocacy.