@armiduh Yeah I often read closely until I find the answer then quickly skim all the others. Been burned too many times by selecting answer A type answers, and moving on without at least glancing at the others.

I selected A on this one, and then immediately switched to E when I skimmed through the rest. Saved me some points.

@SeanWolfe It is reasonable to assume the smallest daycare is at least the size of the largest families, in general.

Its not a MBT. Assumptions are allowed. The more reasonable the assumption, the less of an issue it is the the hypothesis or support.

You are trying to force an un-reasonable assumption when a more reasonable one is more likely.

I suck at these. I'm so quick to go "age 40-60? that has nothing to do with the argument. ELIMINATE"

When that is precisely why its the answer in a EXCEPT question. The except ones get me like 50%+ of the time...

Don't be afraid to find the right answer and not even read the others. Makes it so much easier.

B eliminates an alternative hypothesis. Its the answer. Done. Next

@TeklaCo B eliminates an alternative hypothesis. Namely that something besides heavy metals in the sewage promotes resistance to antibiotics. It strengthens the correlation between heavy metals and AB resistance.

You can spin this towards ideal experiment if you spin the whole thing to be treated as an experiment, but we weren't really presented with that were we. Just a single microbiologist's opinion on some phenomena.

@xyzana I do this all the time. Its the biggest weakness I have right now. Especially the EXCEPT questions

I didn't even have to waste time on the other answers. Skimmed them maybe, but was able to find a very strong weakness of the study, and move one. Take advantage of that.

@ClarEmile What? You were confused because you knew the answer? Also a STEM major, and also knew intuitively that was one of the flaws with this type of study, so went into hunt mode, found it, and got it done much under time. Don't be afraid to use your outside knowledge. Unless the question painstakingly builds a hypothetical world which differs from ours, then you can absolutely use real-world knowledge to avoid naive assumptions. Its an advantage, not a hinderance.

@IsabellaP NOT "proves the stimulus hypothesis wrong". WEAKENS the hypothesis. Maybe the hypothesis is still true, but we have given a valid reason to call it into question. ie, weakend it. So don't rule out an answer options just because it does not definitively rule out the hypothesis.

@kaliyahwilliams Oops you should re-read it! It does not say anything about other reasons for blackouts. That is one of those naive assumptions.

@SeanWolfe C) is like those ones that only resolve half the phenomena.

@MRod Hmm its worse than that. Lets say "emotional strength of argument = outnumbering = program bias" were true. That would make it even more wrong. That would strengthen the conclusion, not weaken it.

@PennJoon2025 Yeah I had C & D both sitting there, but C requires the (admittedly reasonable) assumption that the station really just cares about views, and emotion gets more views. D requires maybe an assumption that the station did NOT fairly distribute interviewees beforehand based on opinion, but an assumption of action compared to disaction would require much more reasonableness to be on par, and I just don't think we have that here. Both are reasonable, and disaction is simpler to assume than explicit action. Never assume malice when incompetence will suffice.

@Super_Cookie my favorite way to eliminate answer options is if I can just say "who cares?" I can cross it off and move on.

I'll be honest, I saw "Most viewers" and moved on. Didnt even read the rest. Why read it. Its asking for us to weaken the conclusion about the station being biased due to the amount of interviews. How would viewers affect any of that? Maybe there's some way, but its not likely and I can come back if nothing else pops out as correct sooner.

I don't know if I recommend doing that, but just sharing how I approach a lot of these.

@DouglasSmith yeah and I also agree its unlikely. Its not a perfect answer. Of all the answers, C & D are most likely even though both have serious issues. But D has much more issues with reasonableness.

I just got to weakening module, and now reading this one all I can do is think of holes to poke in both of these.

But its important to remember what the stem is for this question. Its most supported. Not must be true, not weakening. Just simply. What is most supported, or in otherwords, least unsupported.

@DouglasSmith Did not possess =/= never possessed. If I was a wide receiver, and had a playbook, and knew all my routes well, and then lost the playbook and a year later wrote my own abridged version of it, its likely that I would be able to re-create my own routes very well, and not the rest of the playbook as well. The stim never says I never had access or even ownership temporarily of the playbook, just that I did not have possess a copy of it still.

@DouglasSmith Remember, the author needs to not have had a copy, AND needs to have an abnormally accurate recollection of only a particular character's speech and not the rest of the play.

We don't know what happened. We are judging the reasonableness of assumptions. Even if one thought that it was more likely a spectator did not have a copy of Hamlet than an author did not have a copy, you need to fulfill the other assumption. It is somewhat reasonable to make the first assumption. But it is very far-fetched (un-reasonable) to make the assumption a spectator was able to memorize a particular character's speech so well as to be described as "very accurate" compared to "slipshod" for the rest of the play? This second required assumption is so un-reasonable as to make the slightly greater reasonableness of the first assumption of less relative importance.

consistently getting 5/5, sometimes 4/5 on these, and consistently under time on 80-90% of the questions. Wondering if I should just jump to reading comp as that is where I imagine I will struggle more.

@DouglasSmith regardless, I would encourage you to ask “why am I wrong in my reasoning” and not “isn’t this questions wrong”? The LSAT questions are not wrong. Just take that as gospel truth

@DouglasSmith Wouldn't this be more likely that the actor who had a role to have a copy of Hamlet?

You just brought in an assumption. Why is it necessary an actor have a copy of Hamlet? Why would it not be equally likely they had a copy of their speech only?

It’s more reasonable actually to picture an actor and spectator to have equally messy recollections of the entire play without a copy of it. The actor may be slightly better but not necessarily. And regardless, the fact a single speech was much much better than the rest of the play, indicates someone intimately familiar with that particular speech. Which points to an actor that did that speech much more than it points to a random spectator who would be more likely to remember as well as they remembered the rest and no better.

It’s funny bc in this one all you need is “it is more likely now than it was 5 years ago for a car thief to be convicted of the crime”. The decline in overall auto thefts doesn’t really matter. The total thefts could have gone up or stayed the same, and the answer would still be the same.

Today’s thieves are less likely to abandon the car before it’s noticed missing -> more likely to be associated with the stolen card -> more likely to be convicted of its theft.

@AndreCarter The LSAT is not a casino.

For real though I believe this to be very true. As an example, I typically answer 15-30+ seconds under time on questions I can predict and hunt successfully which is currently like 70% of questions so far. On this one I predicted something along the lines of “juries are more likely to find thieves guilty”. Which was incorrect, and I had to go into POE mode. I actually hunted each answer twice before going into POE mode. I eventually selected A, and ended up going 19 seconds over time. However that time loss was more than made up for by any single previous questions where I predicted and hunted successfully and saved 30 seconds or more.

@GabrielLerma While some students believe this to be true, they are incorrect. It is faster in the long run to hunt for your prediction, and then switch to POE mode, only if your prediction cannot be quickly found. That is because the time taken to hunt for a prediction is little, and the time taken to use POE is great. That means overall you should be able to save much more time on successful hunting than the amount of time lost to your unsuccessful hunts. Furthermore, the more you study, you will likely get better at predicting a correct target for your hunt and resulting in more frequent successful hunts, as well as making each successful or failed hunt faster regardless of result. This results in the delta between the total time saved by using “hunt first” instead of “always POE” will grow over time as you get better at LSAT questions.

Stem: Gabriel and Dan disagree on what point?

That was a toughie. I pigeon-holed myself into hunting for something like “juries are more likely to prosecute now”, and took me a while to consider something else like “car thieves are more likely to be caught than they were previously”, which A) implies