Hey, you got this!! I took the June LSAT too (it was my first time) and my score was 10 points lower than what I was scoring on my prep tests. It happens to the best of us, we just have to not give up!

I'm interested!

@

If you're getting the questions wrong, I'd maybe keep a wrong answer journal. That helped me a lot with understanding LR! I went from getting 8-10 questions wrong on LR to missing 1-2.

For the wrong answer journal, you can copy the question you got wrong into a doc and then write:

-the question type

-the reason why you missed it (were you rushing? did you struggle between 2 choices?)

-your reasoning behind each answer choice (like why it doesn't work or why it's correct)

-a note to yourself on what to do next time

hope this helps!

Is it because you are running out of time or because you are getting the answers wrong?

me too!

Thank you to @, @, and @ for your comments!! I was having a lot of trouble understanding why E was correct. Y'all helped me realize I was making a lot of assumptions :)

I know that this thread is 2 years old, but I just worked on this question today and I had the same confusion and picked C. So I thought I'd reply here in case it helps someone else in the future.

For me the last sentence of the stimulus was easy to misinterpret because of the way it's written with the clause about deterrence in the beginning:

-"Clearly, then, to maintain military deterrence, a nation would have to be believed to have retaliatory power so great that a potential aggressor nation would have reason to think that it could not defend itself against such retaliation."

If you rewrite the sentence so that the phrasing isn't as confusing, the conditional relationship becomes a lot clearer:

-A nation would have to be believed to have retaliatory power so great that a potential aggressor nation would have reason to think that it could not defend itself against such retaliation to maintain military deterrence.

I interpreted the conditional relationship to look like this:

Belief in retaliatory power → Fear of retaliation → Military deterrence

The original phrasing made me confuse the necessary and sufficient conditions, and I wrongly thought that it was: military deterrence → belief in retaliatory power, which is exactly what answer C says and makes C an attractive choice even though it's a mistaken reversal.

Answer D is the correct choice because it triggers the conditional relationship that's laid out in that last sentence. If deterrence is the goal, then it's definitely in the interests of a nation to make its retaliatory power known to others and make them believe that power exists.

Congratulations! This gives me hope :) thank you for sharing