It's because from the third rule ("any city that is connected with Honolulu is also connected with Toronto") you can infer that H and M can't be together because if M is connected to H, then it has to also be connected to Toronto but that violates the first rule saying M can only be connected to one city.

Ed Snowden's memoir is great:) Also currently reading RBG's My Own Words.

I think you're trying to attack a premise that we're given (P2 below) instead of analyzing the support the premises give the conclusion. In LSAT arguments, we will take the premises to be true, so here we should accept that the methane falls apart due to sunlight.

P1: Scientists detected methane in Mars' atmosphere

P2: Methane falls apart when hit by UV radiation from sunlight.

C: the methane in the Martian atmosphere was released recently

You can also use LSAC's Lawhub to take individual sections. It's good practice to use that interface since that's what the actual test uses.

"Only [blank]" is going to be group 2, introducing the necessary condition so I would have diagrammed it the same.

I'll put in a good word for The Loophole! Sometimes you just need to think about things a little differently. I will say though, that it takes a good amount of time to actually go through the book and do the drills. I wouldn't recommend just breezing through it, otherwise you're not going to get the most out of it.

Correct. A few rules of thumb to figure out a good target time - one is to read the passage in ~3 minutes and spend 2-4 minutes on the questions depending on difficulty/# of questions. Another is for each question, allot a minute + 2 extra minutes on top. E.g., if there are 5 questions, spend 5+2 minutes for the passage. With practice you'll get quicker and have no problem hitting the target times. Keep at it!

What's your strategy for NA questions?

Mine:

1. Restate premises/conclusion in my head.

2. try and figure out what assumption(s) the author is making. Sometimes it's not so obvious, so it's ok if you can't pick it out. If you can, try and hold it in your head for the ACs.

3. MBT test. I like to go through each of the AC's and ask: "MUST this be true for the argument to be true?" This typically eliminates 2-3 of the answer choices.

4. If I'm stuck between two of the AC's, THEN I'll use the negation test. But basically the negation test isn't meant to be used as a brute force tool to go through all of the answer choices with. It takes a lot of mental energy and you probably won't have the time to do that under timed conditions. It will also get tricky because the test writers write the ACs in such a way that it's hard to properly negate.

So for this question:

1. Conclusion = today's television viewers exercise their imagination less than radio listeners of yesteryear.

2. I think one of the assumptions of this argument is that watching TV = using less imagination than compared to listening to the radio. Presumably because radio listeners have to actively picture scenes in their heads whereas TV viewers have everything portrayed for them so they're using less imaginative brain power.

3. When I read A, my thought process went: "MUST it be true that [people spent as much time watching television today as people spent listening to the radio] for it to be true that today's television viewers use less of their imagination?" The answer is: we really don't know. The LSAT writers are trying to bait you into answering yes/no to questions that we don't actually know the answer to. Ultimately, we don't know that it MUST be true for this to be the case -- we can only debate this.

In real time, I eliminated A pretty quickly and was able to move on to the rest of the answer choices. I think this is a large part of having drilled a lot of NA questions using the "must this be true" test to get used to what kind of answers the test writers like to put in to try and trip us up.

4. I didn't do the negation test for this AC, but if we were to say "it's NOT true that people spend as much time watching TV as people listened to the radio" it doesn't really do much to the argument for me. I mean....are people watching TV more? Less? It's undefined, which means we're left to make assumptions which lead down a bad road to wrong ACs.

I think it's one of those quirks of the LSAT where we're not supposed to extrapolate beyond what's given in the stimulus. So in this context, we don't know anything about the entire population of beetles - just the discrete population the observer spots in the two different years.

My reading of this was that there's an argument and counter-argument as to what constitutes mastery, but they're not debating the meaning of the word itself. When "two different meaning" flaws crop up, they're typically in the form of a homonym. I also just did PT 19.2.1 and it's a perfect example of the author confusing one meaning of the word "exploit" if you want to look at that.

I'm in!

7Sage calls those sequencing games! In the core curriculum, there's a section titled "Introduction to Logic Games & Sequencing Games" and you can go from there.

I've subscribed to Arts & Letters Daily (if you want practice with humanities based readings) and I also really like The Atlantic.

PT 17.2.2:

"Many people do not understand themselves, nor do they try to gain self-understanding. These people might try to understand others, but these attempts are sure to fail, because without self-understanding it is impossible to understand others. It is clear from this that anyone who lacks self-understanding will be incapable of understanding others."

Needed this, even just for daily study!!