@marymoussa67424 same

@fmarshal90 You can change this in your settings, but 7Sage doesn't recommend it because it inflates your blind review score and takes away from your learning. You want to review a question and know that you could have gotten that one correct, so it makes you think harder about your answer choice and the secondary answer choice.

With inflated BR, you already know one of them is wrong and select the other one...then learn nothing!

@calliekoskovich If you hover over the timing for a passage, it shows you the breakdown of how much time spent reading vs answering questions. Not sure if that's what you meant...

@HilarySackor same

@JohnBlessing Dang! I want to be like you when I grow up!

@JoeMicsan oh yeah.. 10/13 for me but suuuppeerr slow. Whatever your brain is doing, I need to do too!

@Gregmjr Agreed. I was also confused because both passages were 5 star and I only had 13 total questions where some people say 15 or another number. Only 4 questions were level 3 with all other questions being 4 or 5! Not only did this absolutely crush me (I am exhausted), but I took much longer than they wanted me to across the board. I was 12 total minutes over time in the first passage (reading+questions) and 8 minutes over on passage 2 (reading+ questions).

Now, I wasn't necessarily trying to make time and my biggest issue with RC is already time, but THIS WAS VERY HARD. Everyone's comments here are confusing me!

@Livandthecats but supersets/sets are denoted as C^M. The arrow is only used for conditional relationships, which as blosciale says, this doesn't appear to be that even if "if not mammal, then not cat" and "if cat, then mammal" makes logical sense here.

@KevinLin Ah found a thread that had my same line of thinking! My reasoning is that we are strengthening an argument from its current state. At the end of the stimulus, the Earth-Moon Limitation Theory is weaker than the Inner Solar System Theory because of the mars rock that does some serious damage to the EM theory. Explaining that evidence away restores the EM theory back to its baseline strength of = to SS theory at least.

Answer Choice A, however, doesn't help pull the EM theory out of the hole that the Mars rock created for it because regardless of whether there was an increase or not, the bombardment could have still been intense enough to be considered part of LHB as stated above in this thread. I don't see how, without 100% confidence that there was an increase during LHB, A even helps strengthen the EM theory at all. Leaving me with D which at the very least pulls the theory out of the hole and into baseline support. Does that make sense?

@KevinLin'sOldUserName pls help...

I watched both explanations and dug through these chats (wish we could search) but cannot get an explanation that gives me the confidence on why A is correct. I understand the line of thinking being explained, but what doesn't make sense is why we are so sure there was an increase at all?

Hypo 2 suggests a continuous decreasing bombardment, but I don't see how it suggests an increase.

It says the latter part was so intense that it obliterated evidence of earlier impacts, but all that suggests is that even at the tail end and lowest part of this bombardment, it was still intense enough to destroy evidence of past hits. Does a hit have to be more intense than another to destroy its evidence? I don't understand why we are so sure that the passage dictates there was an increase which would then make A make sense.

I understood A to imply there was no increase in intensity, which is irrelevant as I didn't think there needed to be an increase or decrease in intensity for the bombardment to have hit Mars. Perhaps Mars was hit heavily consistently for all those years? Perhaps it was a slow decline in intensity, but still was hit nonetheless?

What am I missing here? I'm sure it's obvious since nobody else seemed to have the same confusion. Thanks in advance!

Kevin's answer in a different thread: It's because that question stem would be part of a 2-speaker stim. Craig would almost certainly be the second speaker. So when we're asked the "function" of Craig's comment, it's asking about Craig's purpose is in his response. Was it to question an assumption? Counter a premise? Etc.

@EDITHNEDWARDS-MIZEL came to the chat for this exact reason.

@mvmarras11534 I mean I understand why the answer is C, but I feel like the explanations for why the wrong answers are wrong are incredibly weak in this one (exception, I love how he explained A by providing stimuli that would make it right).

For B, what helped me was piece-mealing it:

"intention to produce that effect"

well, the effect produced was publishing trends that people don't like...

Did the author of the stimulus think this effect is evidence that this was the intention all along? NO! He explicitly says that the intentions are based on false assumptions, implying that they don't know they're wrong and likely intended for people to like what they're publishing.

@SimonArmendariz Thank you! That was super helpful

@SimonArmendariz So, to state a claim as fact can = taking that fact for granted?

Those last two examples being variations of each other was most helpful. I wish all examples of common reasoning methods used the same scenario so it would be clear what changed and why.

I didn't want to assume that Acme had switched out the switches before the wreck as it was never said explicitly. I therefore left room for the possibility that it could have been done after the wreck which would mean they didn't know it was a hazard but they do now...ergo why I thought E was wrong and chose A. Can someone explain why that was poor reasoning?

What does it mean to take an argument/premise for granted?

@Sarah975248 Knowing which section to focus on is a blessing in disguise!

I feel like these answer explanations could be better. Often times, it sounds like he's coming from the perspective of someone who already knows what the right answer is and every explanation is in relevance to the correct answer. Instead, I'd appreciate if he came from the pov of why someone would find that answer attractive and explain why that is flawed. For example, Answer choice C could be attractive to someone who had accurately predicted the correct answer to be about how planting trees leads to less native grasses. At a quick read, if you're looking for that answer, it seems like the LSAC team knows that and is trying to trick you. You're likely thinking "deforested" as in cleared out of grasses to plant the tree. Yes that is a dumb conclusion if you really think about what deforested means, but likely at a quick read you may find yourself overlooking that word because you know what you're looking for. The brain has been proven to see faces in trees and cars and shadows when we're looking for them, shapes in clouds or ink blots, etc. When you're looking for something, your brain naturally fills in the gaps, and that is something LSAC seems to try to play off of here.

@JennaInch &

@JuliaS.

thank you both! this makes sense and I see what I overlooked.

@ArcherHeeren Try thinking like this:

If the necessity does NOT happen, it guarantees the FAILURE of the sufficient.

If the sufficient has happened, then it must mean the necessity also happened.

So in your example:

mastering conditional logic requires some amount of memorizing conditional indicators

If we do not memorize some amount of the conditional indicators then we will certainly fail to master conditional logic.

If we mastered the conditional logic then that means we must have memorized conditional indicators.

We cannot be sure that just because we memorized conditional indicators that we mastered conditional logic because there are other factors we must also do to achieve that goal. Memorizing is one of many factors. And we cannot say that if we did not master the conditional logic then it must mean we did not memorize the indicators because we could have done that successfully but failed to do some of the other things required.

Therefore:

memorizing indicators = necessary

mastering = sufficient

Hope that is helpful!

sufficient (S) = if S happens then X must happen

necessary (N) = if N does not happen then X cannot happen

Interestingly enough, S not happening doesn't mean X won't happen and N happening does not mean X will happen. Which I think would have made total sense to me if you hadn't spent a bunch of exercises teaching me how to use the contrapositives of everything with no care as to whether it's necessary or sufficient.

Number 4 feels wrong logically because if you know how to cast Herbivicus Charm, then you can mix plant material into garden soil and if you do that then the number of beneficial soil bacteria will increase. That connection feels logical, yet lawgic claims there's no connection. What am I missing?

@sjlutgen THANK YOU