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albialbania68
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albialbania68
Monday, Sep 22 2014
Probably the hardest question I've seen on the LSAT with only 32% of people getting it right.
Answer choice D works, in my mind, if you assume that therapeutic effects can't ever be known side effects. What if they were one and the same in at least one case?
Can they ever be? Or are they, by definition, separate things? To take the example above, what if purple hair were both a therapeutic effect and and side effect?
albialbania68
Monday, Sep 22 2014
I'm not particularly good at assumption questions, and it's mostly because I spend too much time figuring out how to diagram them. I've decided that for me, diagramming during timed conditions is probably not the smartest move.
I've sort of come up with a system that has helped me a bit to answer these questions on the fly. Basically, as I'm reading the stimulus, I will circle sufficient and necessary conditions in sentences. Then I draw lines between these circled terms to see that they are connected on the paragraph. When I hit a condition that is new and disconnected, generally in the conclusion, I draw a box around it. Then I basically take a look at the stimulus on paper to see which, if any terms I circled, do not link up in the chain. I look at the term I boxed, which is the new term, and think of how the circled term can bridge with the boxed term.
So in this particular question the terms I had circled were (Anger), (insults), (unreasonable), (assertion). The terms I had boxed were [Pity] and [grateful]. I had linked the term insult throughout the passage, linked assertion with the term assertion that followed it in the next sentence, and basically what remained unlinked were the terms (anger), (unreasonable), [pity], and [grateful].
I knew that at this point that I needed to build some type of bridge between the circles and the squares. And really answer choice C did it better than any of them.
This is a very dirty method of doing it, and definitely don't replace JY's Lawgic for this if you don't have to. Also, I'm not saying that it is always effective or always reliable, but if you're having trouble with these types of questions, give it a shot, especially for longer passages where the verbiage really does lose you.
albialbania68
Tuesday, Aug 19 2014
Feels kinda good to eliminate answer choices on the LSAT simply by reasoning "I don't know" (this to be true based on the passage). haha... but at the same time, it's hard to keep your prejudices out when you're making assumptions like the ones with which the LSAT baits you so frequently in life because a lot of the time you DO know. In that case, what you now can actually hurt you.
albialbania68
Friday, Sep 19 2014
Hey JY, the singular of mice is mouse and the plural of fish is fish. lol. Just for reference in future videos. ;)
albialbania68
Tuesday, Aug 19 2014
Haha, great characterization of what attitudes we should have towards the stimulus as opposed to the answer choices. I had never thought of the stimulus as "my friend," containing all the clues necessary to help me, and of the answer choices as my enemy, designed to lure me away and to steer me in the wrong direction. These answer choices are little devils indeed!
albialbania68
Thursday, Sep 18 2014
Maybe Jenkins thinks that research funding considerations are of equal importance to the risks posed to researchers in January and February? How can we say with certainty that he thinks research funding considerations outweigh the risk posed to researchers?
I don't know, but it just doesn't seem so cut and dry to me. Imagine a scenario in which Jenkins wins the argument with Lurano and they send the researchers to the North Pole in January and February. One of the researchers then dies due to exposure to cold. Lurano sues Jenkins. Jenkins is in court on the stand and the prosecutor asks him:
Prosecutor: "Dr. Jenkins, did you realize that sending researchers to the North Pole in Jan and Feb would be more risky than sending them in March and April?"
Jenkins: "I knew the risks would be greater, yes."
Prosecutor: "Then why did you push for sending them in these two months instead of the months that Dr. Lurano had advised?"
Jenkins: "Two reasons: 1) the possibility of conducting valuable research on snow would be lower due to the higher chance of snow melting in March and Feb. and 2) the possibility of research funding going to waste would be higher if they were sent later."
Prosecutor: "So in your judgment, the risks to funding and research outweighed the risk to the lives of these researchers. You, Dr. Jenkins, cared more about your money and your research results than the lives of these brave researchers!"
Jenkins: "Not so. While I believed the risks to researchers would be higher in Jan and Feb, I would not have sent them in if I believed that the exposure to cold would be substantially more dangerous than sending them in February and March. In fact, the reason I didn't send them in December (as a colleague of mine advocated) was precisely because I wanted to minimize this risk. My analysis for sending the researchers in Jan and Feb depended first on their safety. Once I determined the risks were only marginally greater in Jan and Feb then March-April, I proceeded to argue that the added benefit would also be less risk to funding and research. So I wasn't necessarily weighing one factor against the other. In my judgment, the total benefits outweighed the total risks for Jan/Feb."
Prosecutor: "But Dr. Lurano claims that researchers run more risk from exposure to the cold in January and February than in March and April. You willingly put these researchers in a riskier situation."
Jenkins: "The North Pole is perpetually cold and researchers always run a risk from exposure to cold no matter what time of the year they go. However, if you're going to argue that research funding considerations for me outweighed risk posed to researchers, then we should also put Dr. Lurano on the stand for the same crime! Dr. Lurano knows that there is still a chance of finding snow on the North Pole in May and June. Researchers would run even lower risk from exposure to cold if sent there during these months. In fact, Dr. Yew was advocating for sending the researchers in the summer, but Dr. Lurano and myself disagreed because we believed that the chance of squandering funding would be high. Dr. Lurano, therefore, willfully chose to put these researchers at more risk by advocating that we should send them in March and April. By that logic, it must be because for him the research funding considerations outweighed the risk posed to researchers."
Yeah, I guess this got a little out of hand, but my point is that it is difficult to say what factors outweighed each other. It's a relative issue. I think we can say that Jenkins' first priority was the health of researchers but he believed that the risk they would run was only marginally higher than if sent in March-April. Why do we have to juxtapose risk to the researcher with risk to funding and falsely conclude that one necessarily outweighed the other in the researcher's mind? Because, to me, it seems that Lurano is also guilty of this. Doesn't he also want to send researchers to the North Pole during months of the year when it is still very cold in order to conduct research on snow? Isn't he putting them in a risky situation? I looked it up and it seems the average summer temperature for the North Pole is 32 degrees. We can safely assume they can find snow there if they wait till summer or at least till May. Yet Lurano says send them at the end of Winter in March. For him too research funding considerations outweigh the risk posed to researchers by the temperatures at the North Pole.
albialbania68
Tuesday, Sep 16 2014
I was at first skeptical that the last sentence was a sub-conclusion, but upon dwelling further on it, I am convinced that it is.
The last sentence that "Voters often reelect politicians whose behavior they resent" is one instance used to explain a larger phenomenon that is the author's central point: "People's political behavior frequently does not match their rhetoric."
Put it in premise - conclusion format and see that it makes sense.
Since voters often reelect politicians whose behavior they resent, therefore, I conclude that people's political behavior frequently does not match their rhetoric.
Try it the other way around and see that it makes less sense.
Since people's political behavior frequently does not match their rhetoric, therefore, I conclude that voters often reelect politicians whose behavior they resent.
albialbania68
Saturday, Aug 16 2014
Why is the difficulty rating for this question so high?
albialbania68
Monday, Sep 15 2014
I chose C, but I had a tough time eliminating D. Is sterilization important? Why should we assume that it's important? Maybe we can recycle plastic without needing to sterilize it? Is the plastic that's sterilized done so completely? Are we saying that we cannot accept recycling of plastic unless it is completely sterilized? How much sterilization is acceptable? I don't know...
I mean it's just too much grey area here. Well maybe that's because I'm not familiar enough with plastic recycling process. Maybe it is the case that unless something is completely sterilized in the recycling process, then it cannot be recycled. But to me that's not such a common knowledge, common sense assumption to make. I think the assumption needed here is kind of big.
albialbania68
Sunday, Sep 14 2014
I concede that the other 4 answers are more wrong than answer choice C, but I do not concede that "if it's not a drastic shift in climate" then it is "fairly stable" as the logical opposite for the contrapositive.
You can have mild shifts in climate and and also have a climate that is not fairly stable, in my opinion. Think about a climate which changes 10 degrees in one day. Or one in which it rains unpredictably. Are those fairly stable climates? Not to me. And just what is fairly stable? Is a 15 degree shift in climate fairly stable? How about 20? The level of subjectivity here is too great. There is a lot of grey area, so you cannot claim that if it's not a drastic shift then it must be fairly stable.
albialbania68
Saturday, Sep 13 2014
To me it seems like E is the least plausible assumption to make. Meaning that making the rest of the assumptions are less farfetched than it is to make E. That's how E kinda stuck out to me. As in you can be forgiven for making the other assumptions but assume E and you're going too far. Well, that's what I thought. Surprised I got it right seeing that SA questions are my weakest point.
albialbania68
Saturday, Sep 13 2014
Can anyone draw a lawgical chain for this?
albialbania68
Friday, Sep 12 2014
Would B have been correct if it had said that some of the claims the instructor made about the paintings were true?
albialbania68
Friday, Sep 12 2014
Jesus, I can't believe 50% of all LSAT takers that year actually got this question correct. It completely went over my head and I fell nicely into the trap for A.
Here's my attempt at an analogy, I guess.
Hatha Yoga = Meditation
Individual Counseling = Exercise
Traditional Self Help = Vitamins
Smoking = Cardiovascular health.
Conclusion:
Meditation is a powerful tool for helping people improve their Cardiovascular health.
Premises:
In a clinical trial, those who did Meditation for 75 minutes once a week and also Exercised improved their Cardiovascular health as much as did those who took Vitamins once a week and also Exercised.
The necessary assumption to make is the deeper assumption that Vitamins are powerful methods that improve your health. If you're going to say that Meditation is powerful for helping people improve their Cardiovascular health based on the comparison that it is as good as Vitamins are, then you're implicitly assuming that it must mean that Vitamins are powerful.
That is answer choice D. Answer choice A relies on the assumption that answer choice D made.
Answer choice A says that we're forgetting to talk about Exercise. But the Exercise factor is constant in both groups. Therefore, it doesn't factor. Our conclusion is that Meditation (Hatha Yoga) is powerful because we're comparing its effects to Cardiovascular health (Quit Smoking) against the effects that Vitamins (Traditional Self Help) have on Cardiovascular Health (Quitting Smoking). What we're saying is that Meditation is as powerful as Vitamins.
But that means that we're assuming that Vitamins are powerful to begin with... And what about Exercise? Well, what about it? Both groups are exercising. That doesn't tell us anything. If I told you that you forgot to include Exercise in your analysis, you would tell me no, because both the Meditation Group and the Vitamins Group were exercising.
Really tough. I hope this kinda maybe helps...
albialbania68
Friday, Sep 12 2014
LSAT Pro-tip #53:
Keep your wits about you. Do not let the LSAT writers pull you into their dark, twisted world.
Got it.
albialbania68
Tuesday, Sep 09 2014
It was not immediately evident to me that B goes in the wrong direction, strange as that sounds. I ended up changing my answer to E during BR, but I do think that B was hard to eliminate also because E is usually the desperation answer choice in tough questions like parallel reasoning.
albialbania68
Tuesday, Sep 09 2014
Polls Good Indication = /Polls Grossly Inaccurate
That whole language setup messed me up. Got it right on the first run, but then got confused during blind review and ended up settling for B :/
Also chose B for BR because I didn't think it was warranted to link the Yerxes inference directly into our chain...
albialbania68
Monday, Sep 08 2014
Plesiosaurus: http://66south.com/MaryAnning/files/plesiosaurus.jpg
albialbania68
Sunday, Sep 07 2014
Vacillated between B and E for this one. Chose B on the first run and then changed to E on the second run precisely for the reason that B was more restrictive than E despite the fact that E was a less supported principle than B.
Went from 7/9 correct in the first run through intuition to 5/9 correct after Blind Review. Discouraging...
albialbania68
Sunday, Sep 07 2014
I thought answer choice A touched on both premises, that of improving memory and that of more succinct communication. So I thought that if the oral tradition is more accurate / succinct and if it breeds mental self-reliance, which I took to mean improving memory, then that seemed to strengthen the assumptions made in both premises toward the conclusion that because of this oral tradition is preferable. I eliminated D because I thought it was too useless and simple an assumption to make. Also it only touches on the second premise, that of language and has nothing to say about memory. Guess I'm still a bit confused about A.
albialbania68
Sunday, Sep 07 2014
During blind review, I changed my answer from B to C. Big mistake. When in doubt, just go with the more general / open-ended answer choice.
albialbania68
Sunday, Sep 07 2014
The key assumption you need to make in order to solve this is that Costs of Training are High = Expensive to Teach People
Another key part is to accurately symbolize Prime Purchasers of Computer Software will Not Buy. You need to capture all of that in the necessary condition. Just writing CTH → /B will not lead you as quickly to the correct answer choice.
There's a lot of leaps you got to make when you translate from English to Lawgic. The logic itself is not difficult, but the process of translation is very much so, for me at least.
albialbania68
Thursday, Aug 07 2014
Bad idea to have a direct link to a website that takes me away from 7sage. Why not open SMBC in a new window at least? I had to hit the back button like 10 times to come back to this page because I got distracted with the amusing illustrations there... Wasted some time! I am weak willed, I splork that you change this!
albialbania68
Wednesday, Aug 06 2014
Hi Aaron, are you still looking for a study partner? I live in Philadelphia and am taking the Sept LSAT. Let me know if you're interested and we can set up a schedule and a place to meet!
For the life of me, I couldn't decide between B and E. I knew that what B was saying was irrelevant. But I equally felt that E was irrelevant and could not find a way to make it weaken our argument. I mean, how does the fact that fewer foreign students attend American PhD programs in Art affect the arguments conclusion that North American recent college grads have lower interest in Art PhD's?
And the reason is that the premise doesn't specify if the data it reflects are North American students or students from all over the world. It goes from saying applicants to saying North American recent college grads. Wait, you made an assumption! The assumption is that these applicants don't include foreign students. Because if the data include these students and if you knew that their numbers have declined, then the conclusion you reached is flawed!
Yes, the numbers have declined, but North American recent college grads haven't lost interest! It's the foreigners that have lost interest. You need to account for that. This fills the whole.
Ultimately, I ended up choosing B because I thought that it's just like the LSAT writers to put an appealing wrong answer choice for E. It's a dirty trick but it worked for me this time.