Firstly, keep in mind that these RC sections are materially designed to be particularly tough during the regular time allotted. The whole point of the training is so that you dont always have to rigorously parse through every single line in order to understand whats going on in the passage. While that might be necessary when going through a specific question about context or a specific part of the passage I found it most helpful to employ these tips.

Theres always going to be at least 1 passage that is just not clicking for you. The content will seem hard, or impossible to understand. You NEED to recognize that they are all written in a way in which you CAN understand the argument without necessarily understanding the content to a full extent. Remember that there is a distinction between understand the general structure of an argument, and understanding the make-up of certain organism structures (or any random thing they try to confuse you with). That being said, once you understand the structure of the argument use your time to understand the KEY points. Practice identifying the Premise, Conclusions, Subconclusions, Other Arguments, and everything else JY talk about in these lessons. Get into the habit of knowing where the argument indicators are and understanding the FLOW of the authors argument. In practice that looks like this:

Although many people think dogs are the best animal, critics have recently supported the notion that they in fact are not. This is because a dogs inability to grab things with his paws the way monkeys can is severely limiting. These critics are mistaken, grabbing things with your paws is not the only effective way to grab things. I am going to show you how the dogs ability to grab things with their teeth discredit this claim and prove them to be the superior house pet.

Recognize the shifts in the argument as it flows. Be able to understand who is saying what, what the point of it is and youll be able to see a dramatic increase in the understanding. When you first start reading you may think that the author is going to disprove the people that think dogs are the best because he says "although" but then you see this although coming in to play with the disagreement of the critic... they then support the initial although. This is a really simple example but I can almost guarantee you that the tricky LSAT writing employ sneaky argument flow to trick you and hide it behind tricky content. DO NOT be fooled by the flow. They rarely ask you to explain something that is purely content based without relating it to the argument. In the times that they do ask you to explain something content based remember this: THE ANSWER IS ALWAYS IN THE PASSAGE. They may explain how a scientific process works such as "To successfully dispose of the toxic waste the company must dig at least 300 meters and no more than 1800 meters beneath sea level. This is because water under the surface has the highest salt concentration at these levels and the company can ensure that this salinization will neutralize the chemicals without risk of spread"

They may ask you "which of the following would the author agree is a proper procedure"

Now, notice this doesnt really have to do with the argument, but youll be able to find it in the text.

Bottom line: RECOGNIZE and PRACTICE the difference between the actual content and the argument structure. You will never understand every single different passage of content but you should be able to MASTER the argument structure. Good luck and I hope this helped.

I chose A because it introduces an alternative motivation for the reporters to stay there. Weakening = introducing can someone explain where I am wrong.

You're right until you said "proportion". It doesnt say total number of pears.

Therefore, the fact that the trees are declining cannot effect whats in question which is proportional loss.

Imagine it like this:

years 1-3 there are 100 trees with 10 pears on each and 2 pears are being eaten. Thats a 20% proportional loss.

In year 4-6 there are 80 trees , 10 on each, (since declined) but only 1 pear per tree is being eaten. That means there is only a 10% proportional loss of pears.

This phenomenon would serve to help the officials statement in the sense that "hey look its working! A lesser proportion of pears are being consumed by insects." Or at the very least it doesnt weaken or call into question the phenomenon being described.

AC - B,C,D all go to show why there would be less insects which attacks the hypothesis which states that it is the pesticides treatment doing (BCD say No, its not)

While AC E shows that it could be a lasting effect from a previously used pesticide.

I hope this helped!

On a fundamental level when you see "therefore" at the end of the paragraph its most of the time the MC.

To address your question I can illustrate this to you in 2 ways:

Lets take out all the premises and just write the two sentences in a row

A. Contemporary business firms need to recognize that avoiding social responsibility leads to the gradual erosion of power. Therefore, a business that wishes to retain power as long as it can must act responsibly.

(it doesn't have much support but the first idea leads to the second idea in a from a sequential perspective)

B. A business that wishes to retain power as long as it can must act responsibly. Therefore, contemporary business firms need to recognize that avoiding social responsibility leads to the gradual erosion of power.

Intuitively sentence B doesnt make much sense which means sequentially it wouldnt likely/cant be the MC.

Hope this helped!

Or it would be the other way around years 1-3 its lesser, and years 4-6 its more, but same reasoning applies.

Are we assuming that a mitigated risk for energy shortage can be added as a benefit for B? I thought were strengthening the existing benefits #help

Correction: You're not attacking the premise you're attacking the relationship for weakening q's...

#help I thought since the govt only addressed the ozone layers and failed to address the UV rays which seemed to be the harmful agent that E was correct. It seemed that they were using a false metric of "ozone levels" being fine to illicit that there is no potential harm- which in fact there was from the UV rays...

same

They are not talking about the fish that make it to the markets. They are talking about the overall fish population. I also thought it had to do with the fish we eat!

Thats the golden question! For me, I learn to immediately notice when a question is easier to digest vs more difficult. For example, I saw the amount of info q3 threw at me and decided to come back to it at the end. This allowed me to do the other ones I felt more comfortable with quickly and then spend the remaining time on the more difficult ones. Through his lessons, JY, attempts to employ numerous tips and tricks of things to look for so you can start breaking down the questions right away. For example, you see from the QS that it is a weakening question so the first thing you could do to save time is separate the ctx (if there is) the premise and the conclusion by using the key words (for ctx/P: however, since, but etc) (C: thus, therefore, they conclude that etc) Once you have divided them up, based on the question type (in this case weakening) you know that the AC must attack the premise. So that will be your most important source of info to draw from when you are assessing the answer choices. For each question type there will be another pattern to follow. Also, you are totally correct. Practice, practice, practice! The more familiar you are with pattern recognition the easier/more second nature these questions become. Good luck, hope this helped!