I love that my first passage was about Asian American poetry from Hawaii, and my second passage was about Mexican American literature -- two kinda niche topics that I have spent extensive time reading/writing about. Thank you, LSAT RC section, for occasionally providing some fun reading material!

I'm by no means an LSAT expert, but in my experience in college, it really depends on the discipline. I studied Philosophy and English, and a ton of the academic papers I read used first person pronouns all over the place. Rule of thumb was pretty much that if the first person pronouns are helpful for conveying your meaning, use them - this was especially helpful for essays in which the author was dealing with multiple perspectives and had to differentiate their own perspective from others.

The other thing is, even you think there might be a better way to phrase a certain idea, under time pressure, I think it's probably best to just write what comes to mind instead of wasting a lot of time with exact phrasing. So maybe there's another, more accurate phrase you could've used instead of "stultifying miasma;" that doesn't mean that you should get stuck in the weeds trying to rephrase it. If that's what came to mind, and if it suits your meaning well enough, it's probably better to just leave it and focus on crafting the rest of the essay.

Well... those words ARE the most "precise and efficient," because they most fully and accurately capture the author's meaning. It doesn't make sense to avoid certain words that seem in "poor taste" if those are the words that are most accurate. Same goes for analogies and other argumentative devices that are helpful for illustrating your point. These devices serve an argumentative purpose; they're not just superfluous purple prose-y flourishes. I would think that fully conveying your argument in the most accurate way possible ("big words," analogies, and all) takes precedence over appealing to the whims of a hypothetical exasperated reader who might possibly prefer you to use a simpler, more general/less precise word for purely stylistic reasons.

that's why you gotta do the double philosophy/english route, just to get the logic AND the critical theory jargon lmao

Thanks so much! The wrong answers make more sense to me now (as in, I can better see why they make no sense lol)

#feedback Q09 in this section is the only question I've come across thus far in my studying that I still don't understand even after viewing the explanation and thinking it over myself. I feel like I must be missing something because I cannot figure out how we get from "the world of the story is self-sufficient and recognizably related to our own world" to "the world of the story resembles actual life," but the explanation video takes this equivalence for granted. I can see why A and C are bad answers, but not why they are substantially more bad than B, so I would be unable to choose between the three if I were to run into this question again. If anyone has any advice (either to explain the right answer, or elaborate more on why the wrong answers MUST be wrong so I can at least use POE), I would really appreciate it.

"zombie horror rom-com" so... Warm Bodies (2013) dir. Levine

I got this question right, but I wasn't sure why it was right other than a "feeling." I really think this explanation clarifies things.

(A)'s first premise is a statement comparing one thing to itself, but the first premise should be making a general comparison between all things in the category. Henrietta may very well be wiser at 30 than 4, but perhaps her daughter had more "wisdom points" to start out with, so her 4-year-old-daughter is still wiser than her. One way to "fix" (A) would be to say, "The older a person is, the wiser the person is."

I was also between the two, but I was able to eliminate (D) by using the "test" where you imagine (D) is false and see if you can still make the argument work. Turns out, you totally can, which means (D) is not necessary to the argument.

Imagine that (D) is false: hiring more teachers would improve the achievement of some students in the region if most or all of the teachers hired were underqualified. Ok, fine, maybe a few kids would personally improve, but it could totally still be true that overall achievement is unlikely to improve. The argument still makes perfect sense.

I use this test pretty much every time I'm waffling between answers and it has never led me astray.

You can check whether (C) is necessary or not by imagining that it is false, and then seeing if you can come up with a way to still make the main argument true. Let's say that (C) is false, and many early Hollywood films have already been transferred. Then, the argument's conclusion might still be true, because it's possible that even though many early Hollywood films have been transferred, many more have not, and there is not enough time or money to preserve those Hollywood films that haven't been transferred.

Since the argument can still work if (C) is false, (C) being true is not necessary for the argument.

The same can't be said for (D). Let's say (D) is false, and no early Hollywood films still exist only in their original material. Then, the argument cannot possibly work, no matter how many additional stipulations or explanations we might try to add. Therefore, (D) must be true for the argument to make sense; it is necessary.

No yeah what you wrote is exactly correct, and an abbreviated version of the full explanation.

Here's what I just wrote in response to another reply:

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The reason that (B) is correct, the reason it weakens the argument, is that it actually “reverses the arrow” of causation, giving us an alternative explanation for the correlation between cortisol and non-PTSD people with trauma.

(B) essentially tells us:

(naturally higher cortisol levels) -> (avoiding PTSD when having trauma)

Meanwhile, the argument is trying to argue that:

(trauma + no PTSD) -> (higher cortisol levels)

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I think the whole "ignoring a subgroup" thing is in reference to the fact that the argument is ignoring the possibility that it has just selected a skewed sample size. The subgroup it is talking about (high cortisol + trauma + no PTSD) just naturally has higher cortisol than the general population, trauma or no.

Anyway, your method is exactly the correct way to think about why (B) is right, and I should've used it during my prep test instead of getting lost in the sauce like I did.

I see what you are going for, but I feel that this explanation still falls into the same thought pattern as the original argument. The reason that (B) is correct, the reason it weakens the argument, is that it actually "reverses the arrow" of causation, giving us an alternative explanation for the correlation between stress and non-PTSD people with trauma.

(B) essentially tells us:

(naturally higher cortisol levels) -> (avoiding PTSD when having trauma)

Meanwhile, the argument is trying to argue that:

(trauma + no PTSD) -> (higher cortisol levels)

So, the idea that (trauma) -> (resisting PTSD) -> (higher cortisol levels), as you are saying, would still be consistent with the argument. The "arrows" are still pointing in the same direction, just with an extra step.

Contrast that with (B), where cortisol levels are on the left side of the arrow, independent from "trauma" or "PTSD." Now, the reason these people's average cortisol level is higher than the general population (and the segment of the general population who happen to have not experienced trauma) is because we are just selecting from the sample size of people with naturally higher cortisol levels. Their cortisol levels would have been that high whether or not they ever experienced trauma.

(I hope this is as helpful for you as it was for myself to think through this question, lol)

#feedback I think (C) might also be trading on the misunderstanding that community gardens =/= personal gardens, thus providing an alternative explanation for the phenomena (at least... that's how they got me). But even if that were true, it still wouldn't be the right answer because you'd need to make a lot of assumptions to connect "longer waiting lists" to "increase in seed sales." After all, people probably don't buy seeds just because they're on a waiting list for a garden; and even if they do, maybe the waiting lists are longer just because there are fewer community gardens available, not because more people want to join community gardens; etc...

The way I was thinking about (D) was similar but a little different to this explanation.

The second part of the sentence ("a reasonable person in her position would have assumed...") is about a hypothetical reasonable person who did not read the contract thoroughly, i.e. is "in Cecilia's position." That's essentially just saying "If a reasonable person did NOT read the contract thoroughly, then they would assume..." but of course we have no way of knowing if the contract was written in a way that a reasonable person wouldn't actually read it thoroughly. All we know is what would happen if they didn't read it thoroughly, but that's not really helpful or relevant because it may very well be that the contract was written in such a way that every reasonable person would read it thoroughly.

Another aspect of why (E) is wrong is that it is an incorrect reading of what the passage says. The passage says "it is not necessary for logicians to be logical in their discussions of logic," but the answer choice just says "it is not necessary for logicians to be logical to be competent to discuss logic," seemingly implying that there is some more general standard or characteristic, "being logical," that then in turn is needed to competently discuss logic. That is not the same as what the passage is saying, which is that you actually do not even need to be logical in the discussion of logic, let alone be logical in general.

I don't think any of these answer choices actually negate the premises; they negate assumptions a reader might have been making based on those premises. For instance, (C) isn't saying that irradiation doesn't have the potential to decrease vitamin content; maybe there is some dual process where irradiated foods are also treated to protect vitamin content, or maybe the vitamin content decreases only a negligible amount (implied by the word "virtually"). Similarly, (D) isn't saying that irradiation can't leave behind harmful chemicals; maybe this specific process doesn't do that, or maybe it leaves behind some kinds of harmful chemicals while destroying more of other kinds of harmful chemicals... etc.

So I think you're still right that the answer choices merely weaken the connection between the premises and the conclusion without actually negating the truth of the premises.

Will these kinds of "weaken" questions sometimes include a correct answer that simply does contradict or undermine a stated premise? Or will answers that appear to do that always be incorrect?

The reason I ask is because I think from what I can remember about the couple prep tests I took, these kinds of questions usually just have some claims you must take to be true, and then use more language like "this must mean" or "this suggests" to present the passage's hypothesis/conclusion. It would be great if I could be reasonably certain that any answer choice appearing to contradict/undermine one of those premise claims is wrong right off the bat.