It depends on the passage; if you scroll to the bottom of the passage on blind review, it will tell you.

Sorry, that wasn't very clear. I am talking about lesson 9 from the flaw or descriptive weakening section, "democracy and self-interest". There might be better examples, but I did this one recently.

I guess it depends on your definitions of strong and weak. With strength just meaning the strength of support/form, yes, all valid arguments are strong. But I think the word strength is used in a much more inclusive way in the context of these lessons. He also talks about the spectrum of reasonableness, which looks at the spectrum of support alongside assumptions and says the fewer assumptions you have to make for a conclusion to follow, the stronger it is. In your motorcycle argument, the first formulation assumes that motorcycles are dangerous because you are likely to get in an accident or get injured. In the second formulation, you don't have to make that assumption because you provide evidence as to why they are dangerous. If you include reasonableness in your assessment of strength, it makes more sense why some valid arguments are "stronger" than others. For an example of an argument that could be considered valid in form but makes unreasonable assumptions, look at lesson 9 from the flaw section.

Strength and validity are different concepts. Strength relates to the quality of evidence/support, while validity relates to argument form/structure. An argument can be valid in form yet weak in support. The second one would be stronger since it provides support to the claim that motorcycles are dangerous. An even stronger version of the argument might provide support for the claim that people should not do dangerous things.

Glad I could help, it will definitely pay off in the long run. Good luck with the rest of your studies!

I've spent some time working on it and I think I've got it. The second premise is embedded, but when you undo that, it makes more sense why E is correct.

p1: acquiring info --> difficult and expensive

p2: don't expect the benefits to outweigh the cost and difficulty AND don't acquire information --> rational

p3: consumers don't acquire info

conclusion: these consumers are rational

or with fewer words

p1: AI --> D and C

p2: /(EB > D and C) AND /AI --> R

p3: /AI

conclusion: R

The author assumes the consumers don't expect the benefits to outweigh the difficulty and cost. The stimulus only gives one of the sufficient conditions needed to trigger the necessary (rational). Hope this helps :)

I don't think so because it is already mostly stated in the stimulus. It can't compensate for the jump from the second premise to the conclusion. At least for SA questions, there shouldn't really be any gaps in the logical flow, and A leaves a big one. Why shouldn't voters determine the vote? Why shouldn't the proposal pass? Unless A included an answer to one of these questions, I don't think it would ever be a correct answer. Maybe it could be though if this were a strengthen question and it was the best choice but idk.

you gotta stop asking ai what the answer should be. B is right regardless of what chatgpt says. take this as a sign not to trust ai so much, its good for a lot of things but not logic

I think the intended use of TMD is irrelevant to C being correct. He says that TMD is being used for its intended purpose, and I think it's fine to assume it is, but C would still be correct even if it weren't being used for its intended purpose. When you take the contrapositive of C, you only need to have one of the two sufficient conditions to trigger the conclusion that the use of TMD is unacceptable.

original: acceptable → intended purpose AND /possibility of harm

contrapositive: /intended purpose OR possibility of harm → /acceptable

The use of TMD is unacceptable if it's not being used for its intended purpose, OR hasn't been shown not to harm any portion of the population (or both).

The stimulus shows us that 20% of the population consumes a disproportionately large amount of these peaches with TMD. It is unclear from the study whether these people could be harmed by the amount of TMD they are consuming. This fulfills the second sufficient condition (in the contraposed version) and leads us to the conclusion we want, that TMD is unacceptable.

So to put it briefly, the stimulus doesn't explicitly say the intended use of TMD, but it doesn't matter. There is really concrete evidence given for the second condition (possibility of harm), which triggers the desired result (/acceptable). The conclusion that the use of TMD is unacceptable still follows from C.

I hope this makes sense; the grammar is pretty complicated, which is probably why he didn't bother to go through the entire contrapositive.

slay kathy

Well... yes. The LSAT frequently baits you into mistaking necessity for sufficiency, so you don't want to have your notation be the reason you miss a question. What goes before the arrow is sufficient for the result on the other end of the arrow to occur. What goes after the arrow is necessary if the other thing is present.

A-->B is not the same as B-->A

Even if you somehow have it worked out in your head, where necessity goes before the arrow, and sufficiency goes after. I would undo this thought process asap. Go back and burn it into your brain if you have to. LSAT is hard enough; don't make it more confusing than it has to be.

Hope this is helpful, good luck friend

I know this is 3 weeks old, but I think you have misunderstood the question.

He addresses the "theft to thieve" conflation in the video. Sometimes you have to make assumptions, and the correct answer is not the ideal one you might hope for. The assumption you'd have to make for D to explain the decline in thefts alongside the increase in convictions is HUGE. To assume that if there are fewer thefts, then there are fewer thieves is pretty reasonable. It's not ideal, but it's the best we are given on this question.

To me, D does the opposite of explaining the stimulus. If they are taking the cars apart, then there is less evidence of the crime, and they would be less likely to be convicted. If you're justification for D is that "you can't convict someone if there is no more car", I don't think you understand what this question was asking. Theft went DOWN, but convictions went UP. The correct answer explains how this could make sense. A says the thieves who have been stealing cars are more likely to have evidence against them, so in turn, they are more likely to be convicted.

This is something I have a hard time with, too. I would recommend always practicing very intentional reading, even when not working on the LSAT. I have been trying to do this and have noticed that in a lot of cases, what I think a sentence means or what I want it to mean is not actually what it's saying. It takes more time and brain power than you might feel like using, but over time, it will become more instinctual. Read things that are hard, and the LSAT will seem easy to understand in comparison. Reading things like court cases, philosophy, history, dense novels, etc., has helped me. Once you start picking up on subtleties and nuances, it will become easier not to misinterpret.

GIRL lmao

"Some dogs like bacon" gives no info about dogs not liking bacon. It doesn't mean that some don't, only that some do. With "some" statements, there is a gray area as to what the rest of the set is, but don't conflate the unknown part of the set with the opposite of the "some" statement.

You can infer some from most, but not most from some. They are never "equal" but if you know most, you also know there are at least some.

It's just what you can guarantee to be true from the given quantifier. If you are given "some X are Y" you know nothing specific about the amount other than its at least 1 and not zero. You cannot guarantee that most X are Y from this because all you know for certain is at least 1 (but it very well could be most you just don't know). But, If you are given "most X are Y", then you know that more than half of X are Y. In this case you CAN say that some X are Y because at least one but not zero fits under the umbrella of more than half.

Basically you cannot go up from a weaker claim to a stronger one, but you can infer a stronger claim from a weaker one.

All→Most→Some

Chain only goes forward not back

Also some does not equal many (many is more than some) but he said you won't be penalized on the lsat for thinking of them as equivalent. However many is never equal to most.

Technically yes, but you would probably be doing yourself a favor to avoid using no, not, etc. in your shorthand of concepts. For the contrapositive you had to negate "no communication" which is redundant in notation and can be simplified as just "communication" to avoid confusion. In math if you had 2-(-2), you'd probably just adjust it to 2+2. Both equations equal 4, but the latter is more easy/quick to decipher. It's always best to simplify what you can :)