The key to this question rests on how you deploy the principle — "more demand, easier sell." Let's apply this principle to both halves of the problem.

Cars that are less than ten years old:

1. High demand for cars that are less than ten years old, because high salability of car parts that are less than ten years old.

2. Apply principle: "more demand, easier sell." High salability of cars that are less than years old, because high salability of car parts that are less than ten years old.

3. Missing linking assumption? How do we get from high salability of car parts to high salability of cars?

Cars that are more than ten years old:

1. Low demand for cars that are ten years old or older, because low demand for car parts that are ten years old or older.

2. Apply principle: "more demand, easier sell." Low salability of cars that are ten years old or older, because low demand for car parts that are ten years old or older.

3. Missing linking assumption? How do we get from low demand for car parts to low salability of cars?

Now look at the answer choices. There's no answer choice that supplies what we need for the first half of the problem, but we do find an answer choice that supplies what we need for the second half of the problem. This is (E) — the salability of cars that are ten years old or older is largely a function of the level of demand for their parts. This is exactly what we're looking for.

Another characteristic of recent LSATs — sometimes the correct answer choice will include information that is just totally irrelevant, i.e. "less mobile" for B. You have to learn to identify what's important for your purposes, and what to ignore.

Sneaky question, because the argument is flawed. The stimulus illicitly suggests, without any justification, that the fact that abstract expressionist paintings are MORE aesthetically pleasing than children's paintings means that they are aesthetically pleasing, full stop. You needed to catch the flaw at the end of the stimulus.

Bizarre question. This is most certainly not level 1; this should be level 5. I think C is a lot more attractive than people give it credit for. Why? Certainly, we know that the psychologists are getting it right with respect to which recording is of parents singing to their children. But HOW are they getting it right? On what basis are they correctly identifying the right recording?

It could be, as JY mentions, that the parents are displaying emotion BOTH when singing to their children and when not. In this case, what the psychologists are keying in on, whenever they identify the correct recording, is not the emotion felt but rather some other, random factor. C appears to strengthen the argument, therefore, in that it seemingly rules out this alternative possibility.

Then how can we rule out C? One answer, which JY gives — the false equivocation between "displayed" and "felt." But here's a second answer. Suppose for now that instead of "displayed," C used the word "felt." Rereading the stimulus, we know that the parents were instructed to make the two recordings as similar as possible. If the psychologists are getting it right anyway, then it's very likely that there must be some crucial difference between the two recordings — which, all things considered, is probably the presence or lack thereof of emotion. C certainly makes this assumption more explicit, but it's an assumption we could probably make even without it — which makes it weak support.

Now compare C to D, which seems in comparison far stronger. Basically what makes this question so hard is that D appears to be a cookie-cutter right answer, whereas C is a deceptively, deceptively attractive wrong answer.

I've noticed that the most recent PTs have increasingly featured questions like these — the correct answer, a lot of the time, will be something that ordinarily you'd right-off-the-bat eliminate because of how weak it is. E is a case in point. Just because there's debate about which medieval thinkers were epistemologists — if any — doesn't mean that we don't KNOW which medieval thinkers were epistemologists, if any. Ordinarily, you'd recognize that you'd have to make a major assumption here, and eliminate accordingly.

And, yet, when it comes down to it, E is the only possible answer choice that could be right here. Because even though E requires that major assumption, it's the only one that even REMOTELY weakens the historian's argument. After all, all the other answer choices are explicitly precluded by the stimulus.

The lesson to be learned here is that, for level 5 questions, you should be wary about hastily eliminating answer choices on the basis of the fact that they require you to make some major assumption. Because it could turn out that you have no choice BUT to make this assumption, either because all the answer choices are wrong, or — and this is the worst of all — because this assumption is the least unreasonable out of all the other assumptions that you'd be required to make, were you to pick any other answer choice. (For an example of this sort of God-awful question, look at PT154.S2.Q24).

Horrible horrible question. I'm just going to forget this even exists and stick to what we've been taught.

Truly a horrendous question.

C is horrifically worded.

Isn't D really really weak? For it to actually do anything to the argument, we have to assume that the proportion of jogging injuries in the population is not insignificant — because if it WERE insignificant, then the number of injury-prone joggers who self-selected into Group 1 would also be insignificant. But this is a pretty big assumption.

D would be much stronger if the relationship was reversed — "the more likely a jogger is to develop the habit of performing stretches before jogging, the more prone they are to jogging injuries." Were this to be the case, there would be much more reason to suppose that Group 1 is composed of, to a significant degree, injury-prone joggers.

I guess D is still the best answer out of a crop of bad answer choices. But to me it seems only just barely. Am I overthinking this?

The issue with (D) is not that the relationship is in the wrong direction. It's that (1) it talks about how the desire "strengthens" the repressors' existing tendency to repress, and (2) it doesn't compare repressors to sensitizers.

To see this, imagine that (D) said, "people with the desire to maintain social and academic success and self esteem are more likely to be repressors than sensitizers." This seems to explain why repressors do better in school and are more confident — it's because people who have these traits, are more likely to be repressors.

But (D) does not say that. First, it doesn't try to explain what causes repressors to repress in the first place, but rather what "strengthens" this tendency. Second, it doesn't try to compare repressors to sensitizers. Suppose that X does cause repressors to repress. Well, surely, X could also cause sensitizers to express? There needs to be a comparison here.

Coming back to this question. I'm realizing that something very tricky here is the phrase "will buy/tend not to buy." If you don't read carefully, you might think that this refers to how easy or hard it is to sell cars to junkyards. But that's not the case; instead, it refers to how much junkyards either demand or don't demand cars.

Why is (B) wrong? Two reasons. First, the arthritis sufferers gave varying accounts of the TIME DELAY between the relevant feature of the weather and in the increased intensity of the pain. At best, all we can infer is that the arthritis sufferers' beliefs are affecting their assessment of HOW LONG it takes for them to feel pain, not the INTENSITY of the pain.

I would argue, however, that even this inference isn't supported. This is the second reason: just because the arthritis sufferers are giving varying accounts of the time delay between the weather feature and the pain intensity doesn't mean that their beliefs about the weather are actually affecting these accounts. It could be that their accounts are actually entirely accurate, and that they are varying for some other reason. (B) wants to assume a causal relationship between beliefs about the weather and accounts of time delay based on what is only a correlation.

Kinda scummy that D trades off on ambiguity in the logical meaning of the word "many." What does "many" even mean on the LSAT? 1 or more? Between 1 and all? Or is it context-dependent? Who knows? The LSAC certainly doesn't.

Damn this was a good question.

Sometimes you just can't do anything but laugh. Horrendous question, maybe the worst I've seen out of literally ANY PT.

Good illustration of what makes strengthening/weakening/assumption questions different from others. Yes, strictly logically speaking, it seems that we can't use E to get to the conclusion... but this is a STRENGTHENING question. We're not talking about what's most logically valid here. If we think about what's most helpful for making an inference, it's E.

Really not a fan of the provided written explanation. Video explanation is better, but in any case, here's the way I thought about the difference between C and E:

C — several issues. J.Y. points out that just because you're encouraged to do something, doesn't mean you'll do it. I mean, sure, whatever. But, more importantly, it's never indicated at all that these techniques reduce stress for the laborers to a SIGNIFICANT ENOUGH level such that it would explain why the laborers now get back injuries at a lower rate than that of the office workers. Certainly, the techniques reduce stress. But to what extent? To what degree? Maybe the laborers barely get any benefit from the techniques. We just don't know.

E — it's not great. I'm really not enthused about the quite frankly lazy equivocation between "physical work" and "physical exercise." That said, if we do suppose that physical work = physical exercise, E is a lot better than C. Note here that physical exercise is clearly stated to be one of the most effective ways to PREVENT or RECOVER from lower-back injuries. This language is much stronger than that in C, and as such, it seems to more clearly point toward a factor that might actually substantially decrease the incidence of lower-bank injuries.

This might be the worst question I've ever seen.