@allisonleverock Yes :) In fact, a modifier can't do its job without also pointing at the thing it is modifying. I was simply complaining about the way this curriculum attempts to distinguish referencing vs modifying.

This is an interesting question because it breaks the rule of "weaken answers don't attack the premises, they attack the support".

I think there is a typo in the text of P2 under "No Distinct Form of Reasoning?" S2 says: "In other words, why could the conclusion be true, despite the premises?" Shouldn't that be, "In other words, why could the conclusion be false, despite the premises (being true)? Wouldn't showing the conclusion to be true for additional reasons beyond the provided premises actually strengthen the argument? Or perhaps I've misunderstood the point of this paragraph.

I think this is a great example of how the phenomenon is NOT the premise. It's the context. The stem here says "strengthen the reasoning", meaning the support relationship from premise: "since large corporations have made it a point to discourage alternative-energy projects" to conclusion: "it is likely that the corporations actions influenced...". Answer choice C specifically strengthens that support relationship (only research projects that corporations discourage get their funding curtailed). Getting sidetracked by thinking the phenomenon as premise and how that premise supports the conclusion makes it much less clear, and primes you for distractors

@brydon125 C is certainly a mild strengthener, because the stimulus doesn't require the causal relationship to be generalizable. It says "snoring CAN damage the throat of the snorer", which is satisfied by a causal relationship in a specific subset. When you reduce the variability of potential confounders, you increase the likelihood that an association is actually causal. But it is much less of a strengthener than eliminating reverse causality, which is the biggest threat to a causal claim in a cross sectional (single time point) study, where you can't clearly establish that the proposed cause happened first. Since reverse causality is what E addresses, it's the right answer.

This is a great example of where 7sage could be improved with more rigorous use of causal inference in explanations. This question is a fantastic example of several key issues: A. measurement error: self report of snoring is a poor measure of snoring. Wrong answer because it weakens rather than strengthens the causal argument. B and D, collider bias: the study is conditioned on "having throat surgery". If the exposure variable (here snoring) or outcome (biopsy detectable damage) are associated with the variable conditioned on (having throat surgery), it creates a spurious correlation. Both B and D strengthen the argument by attacking that association, but they do not strengthen as much as eliminating reverse causality. C, homogeneity of test group: homogeneity is an issue for generalizability, but actually helps internal validity, because it reduces confounding (for the variables identified here as homogeneous). Because the stimulus causal claim is "snoring CAN damage the throat of the snorer", we don't need generalizability, and C also strengthens the argument, but again, not as much as eliminating the threat of reverse causality. E, reverse causality: this is the largest threat to the causal claim in a cross sectional study. Eliminating it is the choice that most strengthens the causal claim.

From my perspective, causal arguments are where 7sage seems least rigorous. I am not a fan of treating a phenomenon requiring explanation as premise to a causal argument. The premises to a causal argument are distinct from the phenomenon itself.

@mbfeliz8 Answer choice A could explain the difference with a large assumption, which is that the manufacturer's report of recycled garments includes both those they recycle and those that wholesale outlets recycle (without returning them). Making (A) work as an explanation hinges on the difference between "returned for recycling" and "recycled". That difference exists, but it requires a larger chain of assumptions (wholesale outlets recycle garments themselves, the manufacturer has access to this data, and include it in their data of recycling despite getting paid for it). E, however, just requires you to consider that the stimulus neglected to include the phrase "by weight" in the final sentence. It nicely accounts for everything

@LSATTAKER It's outside knowledge, but just to challenge your claim that it's ridiculous, this is precisely what Charles Darwin's The Origin of the Species was about--changes in beak size in Galapagos finches over even a shorter period of time. Selective pressure can (and often does) change populations very rapidly. The population of bacteria can change dramatically if exposed to an antibiotic. Initially, very small numbers of the population might carry an allele for resistance to the antibiotic. This allele rapidly becomes the most common in the population.

I disagree with Kevin Lin's analysis specifically on choice C. It's not the correct choice, but unless you can correctly diagnose why, you miss out on a lesson here. It's wrong because it's an absolute causal claim about a passage that describes a historical relationship without making a causal claim. Even if the text was more explicit about the relationship between the social changes and the New Women, C would be the wrong answer choice. It is, however, correct that there is textual evidence for social changes relating to both the LC and NW styles, so if that was what led you to C, good for you! Just pay attention to the strength of the inference here, it’s way too strong to say the passage discussed an inevitable causal relationship. The social changes around the freedom of women to enter education, professions, and politics are context for the entire passage, for Chopin, the sentimental realists, LC, and the NW. P1, the topic paragraph, sets the stage PRIOR, with sentimental novels with content = courtship and marriage, style = elevated romantic language. Then in the open to P2, we get, not a description of LC, but the new context that set the stage for the subsequent fiction, WOMEN ARE NEW. They are no longer just relegated to courtship and marriage. They now have the freedom to enter higher education, the professions, and politics. LC are described as feeling free to enter that world as artists, describe it as anthropologists, but then mythologize the limited world of marriage, courtship, and domesticity, suggesting a content that looks backward to the prior world described in P1. Chopin is also oriented to this change, unlike LC, who end up looking back with nostalgia to the old women, Chopin looks forward. The text frames this as rejecting the nostalgia towards the state prior to social change, and instead looking forward to the New Woman and what? freedom and innovation, which is implicitly, the social change. The New Women didn’t just describe it as an anthropologist, they embraced it in both form and content. I will admit, though, that because the entire passage is framed as OLD social conditions of WOMEN, large changes in their freedom leading to NEW social conditions for WOMEN, and the name of the literary style is SAME OLD WOMEN NOTHING TO SEE HERE, it’s probably way too big of a leap to think there is an inference that the style had something to do with NEW WOMEN. So I’ll give him that ;)

If you found that the thread of social change relating to the literary development all the way through the passage, you should congratulate yourself on spotting a theme in this spotlight passage that is not just restricted to one group, but if you chose C as the answer, think about how to identify when an answer choice makes a strong causal claim and when a passage doesn’t. The passage is exploring the changes and their relationships to each other, not arguing about a cause.

Ugh. I tried to distinguish between the holding and incidental argument, because the passage makes rejecting the FWS 'living memory' standard as 'strained' and "excessively restrictive" the holding, and the argument about a state action causing interruption isn't necessary to make that argument. But, logically, of course C and E would both be covered by the holding, and C is a closer match to the fact pattern. I picked E thinking it would be a better representation of the specific thing the passage says the court held, because it would show that it's just the living memory test, but that's obviously not how you're supposed to pick the answer to an LSAT question >:(

This is a fantastic example of an explicitly stated question. The question stem means we need to point to the passage and find the answer there, either directly or as a paraphrase with no inferences. (E) is there in the passage directly. Analysis was difficult because of "the dangers of working with highly radioactive materials". Importantly, (A) is also true, but it is not explicit. It requires an inference. This makes (E) the winner. To people arguing that A must be false because of the timing, I think that is a mistake because it compromises your ability to recognize inferences. If this were an inference question and (E) was not an available answer, (A) would most certainly be the answer. First of all, neglect doesn't mean entirely ignore and not be aware of. It means disregard or fail to attend to. From P2 you can infer that they disregarded the earlier theoretical developments because they did not think they applied to this context. That's an inference, not something explicitly stated. As to the timeline, I think that is not particularly relevant. Consider the following analogy: Imagine the scope of the question was "Saturday afternoon". Suppose a parent left a 2-year-old child at home from 1pm - 2pm and then came back and watched them carefully for the rest of the time. Suppose when they were gone they were aware of the child and thought, well, it's fine because they're in their room watching a show on their tablet and don't really have access to anything that would harm them. Would it correct to say they neglected their child? Yes. So I think it is clearly defensible to infer that the community neglected the early theoretical developments because there was a specific time within the 1930s when they did not attend to them sufficiently to apply them to the experimental data, but it's an INFERENCE, and so is not the correct answer to a MBT question stem. You need 350 words to make the case! For (E) you need only to point to the passage and say, look, here's where it says that.

@KevinLin Yes, you've identified a key part of the disagreement. My understanding is the scope overlap between A and D is required for A to be the best answer. This comes textually from the explicit weakening of crater surveys as a source of evidence in P2 and the limitation of the evidence to an extensive survey of one poorly generalizable location. If the stem had asked for what MSS the view that the LHB did not involve Mars, then the balance changes. But it doesn't. We are not evaluating the weakening of a hypothesis that the LHB covered the whole inner solar system. We are evaluating strenghtening of a hypothesis that the LHB was limited to the Earth and the Moon. Given that, I think you need logical coverage of the rock data with the scope of the crater survey for A to clearly be correct. Not to wax pedagogical, but in my answer journal, I've decided to call this the scientist trap, as a certain high scoring profile is tempted to limit understanding of the evidence to the 'figure' that may have produced it, and is wary of using logical coverage to assess the balance. It's a hueristic that happens in a flash for someone with hard scientist training, and it's appropriately penalized here. To be clear, the reasoning move I objected to in your explanation isn't the scientist trap. They're just parallel in that they independently strengthen one type of evidence for the wrong reason. The structural coverage of A's scope over D's scope drives the choice

@HoolioJoe I think this is a misgeneralization of one question type and one type of system analysis, and it doesn't apply here. This is an empirical passage and the hypos are related in that LHB impacts on Mars are not consistent with both. If LHB included Mars, the 'limited to Moon-Earth system" theory is dead in the water. One piece of empirical evidence (debris of the correct age appears to have traveled from the surface of Mars to Earth) weakly contradicts T3. Disproving that evidence (e.g., by showing it's not from Mars) unequivocally provides weak support to the theory relative to the passage where it is presented as weakly contradicting.

@bernardjoon1261 Mars is not the closest, Venus is. And Mars is also upstream from the rest of the inner solar system (via the sun's gravity).

@DaishaiJohnson the 7sage analytics says 50% of 180 scorers got it wrong. So it's as hard as they get.

Both the video (Kevin Lin’s explanation) and the “lightbulb” analysis are flawed. They commit the same error that makes this question difficult, but post hoc, so it’s hard to see. They both substantially elevate A, which contains an extraordinarily weak piece of evidence for the LHB being limited to the Earth-Moon system. A and D are both about very weak pieces of evidence. The key to this high difficulty question is learning how to balance weak evidence. Pedagogically, don’t let this question train you out of your instincts about weak evidence. If you hate drawing a conclusion from the evidence in A, you have good instincts! Now lets discuss why the evidence here is weak. First, the “seems Martian” meteorite. The meteorite is hedged (“seems,” “if indeed”), and (here I agree with Lin), is about a single impact. The crater evidence, while based on many observations, comes from only one planet and uses a technique the passage itself highlights as hard to interpret and potentially overwritten. By itself, A doesn't allow any conclusion to the rest of the inner solar system (Venus, Mercury, etc.), so it is an extraordinarily weak basis for “limited to Earth–Moon.”

Still, getting rid of the “seems Martian” rock (D) does support T3. (A) also supports T3, weakly. The relevant thing is the interaction. Spotting that interaction is the difficult skill this question rewards. (A) doesn't just weakly suggest that there was not an LHB-like intensity increase on Mars, it also undercuts the meteorite data because it acts upstream of the meteorite in the causal chain where LHB impact leads to (debris and crater) leads to Martian debris meteorite impacting on Earth. The key is recognizing that A does two weak things at once, not pretending A is strong or generalizable to the entire inner solar system. If the crater survey had been elsewhere, say Venus, D would be the answer. It's only because without evidence of LHB-like impacts on Mars we're forced to further reduce the likelihood that the meteroite in the passage is actually from Mars, that (A) comes out on top.

@wifi-router it is, and that is one of the reasons D is tempting. But the question is about the relative strength of A and D. A is stronger than D, despite not being air-tight.

I want to just point out the delicious fact that the author uses the "stealing thunder" strategy themselves, and that is a key point that will help you eliminate a wrong answer choice.

@rjon27 Ping made an error in his model here. It doesn't harm the answer choices, because his model is entailed by the correct model, but it is weaker. Most modifies the subject, large nurseries, and so the text is making a claim about a specific most subset of large nurseries. In that subset, most sell primarily to commercial growers and guarantee their plants. These are the same nurseries, not some separate > 50% subsets.

@Bgsolo "but" operates exactly the same as "and" in logic. The only difference is rhetoric, because it implies a contrast between the two proposition. So the difference is stop thinking about a difference between "and" and "but" in logic! If you see "but" think "that means AND". "Or", on the other hand, is a very different logical operator. "Or" between two propositions (A or B) usually means either A is true and B is false, A is false and B is true, or A and B are both true. This is the inclusive or. You do have to pay attention to the grammar, though, because there are some specific places where "or" means ONLY ONE of A and B can be true, but the passage will make that clear if you pay attention to it. There is a final rare case where "or" in natural language actually means "and", which is when it's part of a comparative claim. If you say A is better than B or C, it actually means two distinct claims: A is better than B and A is better than C.

I think this is an interesting passage because it's one of the few that doesn't contain an argument. It's a statement of a phenomenon and then a statement of a causal explanation of the phenomenon (in the conditional chain), but the conclusion is not explicitly stated.

@JoeSolana4 yes. that's a feature of the MSS (most strongly supported) type of question. I think if it was a MBT (must be true), E would fail.

Ping's analysis of answer choice A makes a common scoping error. He see's an argument about elections and thinks 'presidential elections'. The domain of the argument is all elections, precisely including those without debates, and likely many where debates might occur but be sparsely attended and not well covered. Across that domain, it is certainly not self-evident that skill in something that doesn't even occur (or occurs in front of only a handful of people) would make one more likely to win an election. It's correct that it's not the point of disagreement, of course, as neither passage discusses the likelihood of winning. They just discuss the utility of the debate, if it happens, for the people that watch it. This is not a nitpicking comment. It's here to remind people to watch out for this common error. Don't assume an argument about a given topic (here, political elections) is scoped to the most salient example of that topic in your memory (US presidential elections).

@HenryLehmann close. The point is that you do not know the distribution or characteristics of C, so it is POSSIBLE that A -> /C. The scoop analogy acts as if any >50% subset of B is a random sample of >50% of B. That is the ecological fallacy. It need not be a random sample. It COULD be a random sample. It could require A. It could require A be absent. We do not know.