It happens sometimes! don't give up or let it make you feel bad. Some tests are harder than others, and some contents are more suited to our abilities than others. If anything, be glad that this new PT is allowing you to see weak areas that you might have to work on. however, these are not the only explanatory factors. There are other ups and lows that we naturally have in life. I have a friend (not me btw) that got a -20 on an RC section but they otherwise do really well and have gotten a 166 in recent PTs (two week difference).

@AgnesAlojado This should be changed to automatically target weak areas.

@brendanryankelly My lobster too buttery; my steak too juicy

Go to https://7sage.com/users/settings/preferences. It explains why there. It also explains it if you hover your mouse over the little pink circle with the "i" in it during the blind review.

@berithhan I care! Thank you

@Shannell_E'llan I'm glad people are still getting use out of this lol

I think J.Y. made the logic map of this too convoluted.

S = Sale

H = Highest price it would get on open market

CM = Citizens majority ownership (for at least a year)

if S --> H and CM

if ~H or ~CM --> ~S

We are only looking for an answer choice where a sale has happened despite necessary conditions being failed. We want to find an answer choice that has S and at least one condition, it not both, where said condition would necessitate a ~S (i.e. ~H, ~CM, or both)

E is the correct answer choice because it has S (will sell), and it has one of those two conditions I just spoke about

CM = "The government must place significant restrictions on who can purchase StateRail to ensure that citizens of Country F will gain majority ownership." So we have CM. If this answer choice is to violate the contitutional requirements, then it must have the other condition be ~H, not the highest price it would receive on the open market.

~H = "However, any such restrictions will reduce the price the government receives for StateRail." If this sale was on the open market, it would receive a higher price than it would now with the restrictions. The sale of this state-owned railway is being put in a situation where it would not receive the highest amount that such an entity would receive on the open market. It doesn't matter that there is the possibility that Country F might still sell it for the highest price it can receive (with restrictions). It will not get the highest price if the conditions were such that the same sale was happening on the open market (because of the restrictions). The implication is that the open market does not have those restrictions.

So the final sale in E looks like:

~H and CM --> S

When the original rule said it was strictly to be:

~H or ~CM --> ~S

Clearly a violation.

I think the sentence about the airplane is a red herring. It has nothing to do with the rest of the argument.

A is better than C because the original stimulus says there WILL be a positive side-effect (increased value). A says there WILL be a positive side-effect (being able to exercise again). C says there MIGHT be a positive side-effect by conceding the point "even if the cylinder head does not need replacement".

C would be the better option if the original stimulus said "the improvements MIGHT make the surrounding housing ... more valuable" instead of "the improvements WOULD make the surrounding housing ... more valuable."

Another thing: people in these comments saying it's a stretch to assume exercise is a positive thing are wild. Everyone knows exercise is good for you. Aside from that, the stimulus also says "would enable him to exercise REGULARLY ........... AGAIN," so he was obviously doing it before the injury, too. It's very clearly implied he views it as a positive. Exercise might not be the most enjoyable thing, just like having a job you go to regularly but might hate, but that does not strip the fact away from these two examples being positives for you.

Also, you're not pulling an engine for $175, even 40 years ago. Additionally, you don't need to pull an entire engine, like the engine block, to check if a cylinder head is cracked lmfao, even on boxer or w-type engines.

@mangodolce-1 A is better than C because the original stimulus says there WILL be a positive side-effect (increased value). A says there WILL be a positive side-effect (being able to exercise again). C says there MIGHT be a positive side-effect by conceding the point "even if the cylinder head does not need replacement".

C would be the better option if the original stimulus said "the improvements MIGHT make the surrounding housing ... more valuable" instead of "the improvements WOULD make the surrounding housing ... more valuable."

@crnaylor03 Come on. In what world is exercise not a good thing?

@tjh361508 Totally on the same conclusion as you. Whoever wrote this question does not understand the process of agriculture in the very apparent sense. They are falsely equivocating the ability to replace a crop with a genetic varient the year after with the ability to save a food supply from devastation.

Because they did not lay out any arguments against the scenario where an economy relied on only three crops, the possibility remains open as a counter argument that a country that has two or all three of their crops affected with a blight in one year can devastate the food supply, because they'd have to wait until the next year to plant the genetic varients to replace the blighted ones. What is everyone eating after the harvest of year one? Certainly not the crops that were blighted. There is no replacement grown within the same year. How is the food supply not devastated from such a scenario? I get this is a strawman, but this is a serious possibility that the author of the stimulus and answer choices leaves open.

@CathyYao We don't know that for sure. I initially read it that way, too, but I still got it right. C, even though it matched the logic I wrong down 1:1, it still didn't make me want to choose it, because C doesn't really have any teeth. It doesn't actually make me think "Oh yeah, that's totally why this argument is wrong"

With the first sentence as the conclusion, you get this logic still:

IHS --> BP/MO

------------------------

BP/MO --> IHS

It still fails the sufficiency necessity confusion test. A is still the correct answer choice because that formulation above is not fundamentally different than what J.Y. wrote, which is below:

BP/MO --> IHS

------------------------

IHS --> BP/MO

I fell for C during the actual take. However, I think now that even Babson can't be said to even have an opinion on C at all. He only compares paying for an article to countries where tipping culture exists (and would make paying such a low fee negligable there by argument of relativity and association). He doesn't say people would be willing to pay for an article in places where tipping culture does not exist.

Trap answer choice. I simply read D, picked it, and didn't even bother trying to examine E. My bad! Would have totally picked E if I had read it.

@GrahamSC Right? My first inclination was that either there's evidence that another part of the world possibly has extremely similar trace elements, or the gold somehow found its way out of the mine without actually being mined from it. I suppose background knowledge helped me, though. It's one of the few times background knowledge has legitimately helped me on this test.

@jmuraca011793 Bingo. My exact thoughts during this. Any time I see an "and" in a conditional, I am automatically looking for any way the test makers could be messing with us using that law.

#suggestion This should also have an RRE tag on it.

@SunnyLSAT You're right. My bad. I accidentally thought about this in different terms and didn't quite flesh out my thought process. It prompted me to go back and look at and refresh myself on the square of opposition invented by Aristotle. It brings me back to the days when I was in college taking logic classes for my Philosophy courses. What I say next is simply for anyone who cares to read past this and glean extra insight into negating stuff. Back when I had the square memorized, this stuff--spouting off negations and contrapositions of things--was inherently super easy. So, if anyone ends up finding this interesting, it might help make this test easier for them.

Aristotle's Square of Opposition (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

A = Universal Affirmative

E = Universal Negative

I = Particular Affirmative

O = Particular Negative

Sunny: this is an important distinction

You're totally right to call me out on formulating Answer Choice E (AC E), which is a universal affirmative (A-form):

Any pricing practice that does not result in unreasonable prices should be acceptable.

My previous and mistaken formulation was simply a contrary statement/formulation of AC E rather than a contradictory one (E-form):

Any pricing practice that does not result in unreasonable prices should be UNacceptable.

This is a weird phrasing of a universal negative, but it works by adding the negative in the form of an "un-" before acceptable rather than saying "No" instead of "Any". Tangent ... Bonus: using "any" makes this statement a group 1 using the conditional indicators taught by 7Sage. Using "No" would make it a group 4. Anyway, tangent over.

Sunny: The negation of Any is some. I see that you still arrived at the correct answer but this is an important distinction.

Here's where it's even more important to provide the distinction between the phrasings that can happen with simply adding the word "some" into a statement and expecting it to be the proper negation (contradiction) of "any." Turning AC E into its subalternate form, the particular affirmative (I-form) looks like this:

Some pricing practices that do not result in unreasonable prices should be acceptable

The contradictory statement of AC E (O-form), the correct one to use in the proper negation of this question is:

Some pricing practices that do not result in unreasonable prices should not be acceptable

Honestly, it's now 1:30 in the morning, and I wish I could continue clarifying why the I-form of AC E leaves gaps in the negation test and how the O-form of AC E completely destroys the original argument. However, I am too tired to fully flesh it out, but I'll give it my best shot.

From the OP:

Here the negation of E weakens the logical connection b/t premise and conclusion, but some practices that are predatory and are not acceptable does not necessarily mean that our instance of predatory pricing is also not acceptable.

When the stimulus says "But this practice clearly should be acceptable [implying all cases of this practice]," it is establishing that it needs support from a universal statement or something that rules out ALL exceptions. To validly conclude an A-form, which is the form of the quoted conclusion from the stimulus, the premises must rule out exceptions, and that's what AC E does and assumes. That means the argument would need or otherwise need:

• A universal affirmative premise (All S are P): A-form premise.

• A combination of premises that effectively eliminate all counterexamples

If we take AC E (A-form) and make that assumption a premise, it rules out everything. When we change it to O-form, it legitimately speaks directly against the A-form. It doesn't just weaken it, as OP says. You can't say that all instances of S are P but simultaneously claim with the contrapositive that some S are not P. Only one or the other is true at a time. If we take AC E as the assumption (and it allows the argument to be followed), taking its negation as true instead doesn't allow AC E to ever, ever, ever be true.

OP: some practices that are predatory and are not acceptable does not necessarily mean that our instance of predatory pricing is also not acceptable

We're not talking about a particular instance in the stimulus. The stimulus argues on behalf of all instances where there is predatory pricing.

I just looked again. You can go to "Drills" and create a new Drill and then click "Customize" to bring up old questions. I actually really hate you can't tell the drill maker to present you with a randomization of already taken and incorrectly answered questions. That really sucks.

Nonetheless, under the filters, choose the "Number of Takes" filter and pick "Taken" and you can further refine it if you want to also choose questions under "Result" if you want them to be questions you answered incorrectly. You can also retake specific questions as well that you did during the lessons if you search them up and add them individually.

I know that on the classic version, you could via https://classic.7sage.com/account/ and clicking "Reset PrepTests/Drills." However, it seems they don't have that on the equivalent page anymore on this new version of 7Sage at https://7sage.com/users/settings

I also tried looking around on the Analytics and Practice pages. No dice.

@michaelbrock I got this question right during a practice test by negating each of them and seeing which one absolutely doesn't allow the argument to work. Since E is the correct one, I'm only going to focus on that.

The argument nearly clearly states the conclusion is that "this practice is clearly acceptable," and it goes on to build premises under it. Why is it acceptable? Because it doesn't matter even when competitors aren't in the market anymore. Why does that not matter? Because even just the mere threat of competition arising from competitive pricing *will prevent* those that won through previous predatory pricing from raising their pricing to unreasonable levels.

So we have a clear causal chain from the prevention of unreasonable prices to predatory pricing to be acceptable. If we negate E, it becomes "Any pricing practice that does not result in unreasonable prices should be UNacceptable." I mean that doesn't just weaken the argument. It literally speaks against the whole argument. If we took the Negation of E as true, it would just completely and totally ruin the argument. When negated, it not only did the most amount of damage to the argument when compared with negations of other answers, but it just makes the whole thing not work. I don't know how to explain this any better.

One last thing: I don't see anything about this answer that should beckon your eyes to look for any Sufficient Assumption clues here. Maybe it's just me being dumb or something and not understanding as fully as you. However, I got a 169 on this PT and can't imagine it's a mere fluke due to my misunderstanding of questions like these. nonetheless, I'm sure you could probably teach me a thing or two about the LSAT that I haven't yet picked up. I've been studying for about 9 months now, same as you.