#help In a situation like this with a sufficient assumption that has an AC which is a contrapositive of the conclusion, does that mean we should approach that choice as a strong contender?

I'm in a similar situation and study three hours a day most days, though if things at work are really crazy I try to be flexible with it.

I think you're right about the video explanations explanations—they can be very time-consuming and it's not really a great use of your time to be watching vids for the ones you got right. What I do instead is that I google a couple words from the question stem and check other online explanations available for free (usually there's some from Manhattan Prep or Powerscore, plus LSAT Hacks for some of the newer exams and Kaplan for some older ones). Reading these explanations goes much, much faster than watching answer explanations for LR and RC. If I had a really hard time with an LR question, I'll watch JY's explanation, but only of the stimulus and the answer choices I was choosing between, it helps cut some time.

Also since you asked about study schedule, here's mine: one PT per week plus blind review. Daily LG section and RC section plus review. And then I spend whatever leftover time I have either 1) working through a prepbook (Loophole right now) 2) drilling a question type I struggle with for LR or 3) doing further LG/RC sections. What I choose depends on what my weakest section was in the week's PT.

I got hung up on the potential loophole that the patient just got better with time and that the dosage/drink combo was irrelevant. This incorrectly led me to B, as I reasoned that D implied that the drink was a cause, just not the sole cause.

I realize now that I was reading it wrong, however. D says the drink was NOT THE ONLY cause. This simply negates the idea that it was the sole cause, but doesn't confirm whether it wasn't a cause or whether it was more than one cause.

Always have to stay vigilant of my own assumptions!

Ugh 24 was so confusing. I chose D because I reasoned that the monarchs acquired their bad reputation for reneging on debts/expropriating wealth precisely because they took on a bunch of debt that they weren't going to be able/willing to repay. I thought this implied that, had they faced a situation where they HAD to pay back their debts, they wouldn't have taken out as much debt in the first place.

Meanwhile A seemed like a bit of a stretch. We know they needed money for expansion and were charged high interest rates, but does this necessarily mean that it was difficult for them to finance the expansion? They just had to take out the loans at a higher interest rate, but we don't know that the creditors limited the quantity of loans available? The financing wasn't necessarily difficult to come by, it was just more expensive...

So frustrating!!!!

#help I chose A because the "low probability of occurring" seemed to match the stimulus' "odds are slim that colonization will ever happen," much better than D's "the hypothesis is probably false." I feel like there are so many LSAT questions where you can get donged for a slight shift in language like that, but other times it's ok, and I'm confused about how and when it's ok to shift the language like that.

I've seen so many of these flaw ACs that basically critique the conclusion by proposing alternative causes or pointing out that alternative causes are possible, but had never seen it be the correct answer... so I assumed that such answer choices are universally wrong and second-guessed my way into an AC that I knew wasn't quite correct.

A lived lesson in why "likely to happen" does not mean "does happen" lol.

@ :( That really sucks.

I misinterpreted D entirely and thought that it was referring to "purchasing power of the people" as a collective, rather than individual, purchasing power. I consequently eliminated D, because for a collective purchasing power you would want to reach as many people as possible.

Having a difficult time putting together a "take-away" from this one because I just totally missed the inference from the stimulus lol. I assumed that cats could have the same proteins and that allergy sufferers' different sensitivity to proteins explained the variation.

But now (doh) I realize that makes no sense. If all cats have proteins ABCDE and Bob's allergic to D and Ted is allergic to B, there should be no situation in which Ted, Bob, or any person would not have an allergic reaction to a cat if the proteins are always the same.

pterodactyl screech

There's still a big gap/assumption here between "most theories" and the "most explanatorily powerful theory." I really dislike PSA questions because we often have to leave some kind of gap or flaw in!

#help I got confused about this question because since she was pandering to "loyal readers" by her partisan stance and impugning adversaries, the stimulus seemed to imply that her "loyal readers" are those who already share her political beliefs. If her loyal readers are those who share her beliefs, then by extension those who would read the column and be alienated are only the non-loyal, occasional readers of the column. This seemed to contradict the idea that she was reaching enough of an audience with opposing views to actually alienate people to the extent that she would be furthering political polarization.

This led me to choose D.

I realize to a certain extent the above makes assumptions about number and quantity of opposing readers, but I've also encountered quite a few LSAT LR questions where the correct answer requires some degree of assumption. So how do we know what kind of assumptions are ok in the correct answer and what are not? I've found that many of my wrong answers fall on one side of this spectrum: either I eliminate a correct answer because it makes too many assumptions that feel unreasonable, or then I make assumptions that I think are reasonable but turn out not to be.

Thank you!

#help I'm confused about 17. The author of passage B justifies his definition in part by saying that an alternative approach (genre by theme) creates too many "borderline cases." I inferred from this, obviously incorrectly, that the author would be unlikely to think that his definition of genre would be give rise to many such "borderline cases" and since he only defines the "central works" to the genre it felt to me too large of an assumption to group all non-central works as borderline.

Instead I went for C due to its weak language. Whether the reader has expectations or not regarding a genre didn't to seem "essential" to the equation, especially since their reading "modes" are significantly shaped by the author's intent, not their own.

IDK how this had a level 3 difficulty, across dozens of RC sections I think this is the hardest passage I've ever encountered.

Some of the normative language on this one's very tricky. Like on #11, the passage didn't indicate to me that the movement was that "surprising" and I was thrown off and chose A against my instincts.

Ugh...

#help When can we make the assumption that a species "favoring" a location also means that they actually all gravitate towards those locations?

I'm especially confused about this in light of the PT 89 on "direwolves". J.Y. explains for that NA question that the direwolves' favorite scavenging spot being tar pits doesn't matter because they might have frequented the tar pits regardless. https://classic.7sage.com/lsat_explanations/lsat-89-section-2-question-07/

On the flip side, just because a species "favors" thin leaf floors doesn't preclude them also being in these thick leaf floor areas where the goblin ferns live and eating the leaves.

So confused!!

@ That's amazing, congratulations on your big leap :) Your study process is the same as mine, so good to know that it's the way to go. Good luck with Flex!

What was your study process like? I'm stuck in a plateau and feeling really discouraged.

WTF #13. Doesn't "very little evidence" in itself imply that there is some evidence? Vs. the current situation where our evidence is the rock, which D would eliminate?

Ugh. Bye.

It really depends on your skills. If you have a section that you struggle on the most (say RC) be sure to choose an exam that doesn't have a difficult section for that one.

None of the exams are easier or harder IMO, it all comes out in the curve.

For D, we're already told that prav reduces cholesterol in one of the premises (line 2). So, making that the conclusion would give us a circular argument!

@

I've found that doing full sections + blind review has been pretty helpful for Reading Comprehension, since managing pace, shifting between disparate topics, and keeping short-term memory very active are some of the challenges of the section.

#help C is such a frustrating answer. I only chose this answer after eliminating the rest, but what I still don't understand is: how can we ASSUME that his enemies were plagiarizing existing writings on other alleged tyrants? What if those existing writings just support the idea that Caligula's documented behavior (even if it's been recorded by enemies) aligns with the historical record on what constitutes a tyrant?

My biggest confusion on this passage was that the first paragraph implied that the reason experiments might not be replicable is that it might be difficult to replicate the initial condition. However, in the model, according to lines 40-1, is impossible to determine the outcome of a particle's motion "given its starting point," which suggested to me that the direction of the experiment—even when starting conditions are replicated perfectly— could still be uncertain. I still don't entirely understand why the ACs honed in on the difficulty of replicating the original condition but not so much on the unpredictability of the outcome, which seemed to me what the model was proving.

I also didn't think that "undetectable" errors in starting conditions meant that replicating the conditions was "impossible." It seemed to conflate the world of human perception with physical reality which was tricky to me to parse out.

God, I hope I don't get a passage like this next week lol.

Dang, I would kill for that GPA and LSAT! Congrats on your huge accomplishment!!!