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Hi all, is anyone else having an issue where the questions for their analytics have disappeared?
PT Questions
edwardzh313433
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edwardzh313433
Tuesday, Jul 23 2024
I got -1 on this section. Got this wrong after stewing all my extra time on it. For some reason could not wrap my head around B v. D. But I thought about it some more, and this made more sense to me.
The problem with answer choice B is that we do not know what journalists have to be concerned with. The stimulus just says that journalists have said that to do their work well they cannot worry about the effects of their work. JY says that the journalists can be wrong, We know how the journalists are responding, but we do not know from the stimulus what they need to do.
One way to more quickly eliminate B is that whenever in the stimulus you see that a piece of information is responding to something, that immediately narrows the domain of discourse. When you narrow the domain of discourse in a statement, it means you can make less of a sweeping conclusion from it. In this case, the journalists are responding to the worry of critics about economic news specifically, not all news.
Put another way, we cannot support the idea of B (that journalists should not be deeply concerned about the effects of their reporting on the average citizen) with the idea that for journalists to do their work well in economic newsreporting, they cannot worry about the effects of their work. Maybe, there are other types of news that is non-economic where they should be concerned about the effects of their reporting. We do not know, because the stimulus provides a journalist response only to criticism of economic news.
edwardzh313433
Saturday, Jul 20 2024
I thought that question five was really hard, because you need to have a really strong understanding of what the passage is saying.
I picked C, because I thought that A's required assumption that you would need to warehouse the book binding materials was too large of a jump. In retrospect, this is not the case. I also thought it was weak because the text says "the digital publication of the book requires no physical inventory."
Upon further thinking, that text does not actually mean that there can be no physical inventory of supplies to construct these books; it only says that the publication of the book itself requires no inventory. There is a subtle difference.
C got me because I read too much into the "point of sale" textual evidence in the first paragraph under time crunch. I also fell into the trap that the passage is trying to bait you into make: that eliminating the costs for retail shipping, storage, etc. means that retailers will play no part in selling. Perhaps it's not book stores, but an entirely new species of retailers/distributors that operate print shops? The text does not say anywhere that publishers will assume the functions of everyone else (even though in real life, it likely would?)
These are my thoughts on this question. I only got this problem wrong in this section and it took up the longest time. Very hard I thought.
edwardzh313433
Saturday, Jul 20 2024
The later PT really try to use a similar method in hiding key information in the context. This is a great problem.
edwardzh313433
Monday, Jun 17 2024
I think one general thing that helped greatly with my PsA answer choices is to sub in the answer choice with the stimulus to see how much it matches up.
But moreover, I think something about PsA problems is that they are all flawed. If you pick up on the flaw beforehand, then that helps greatly when you look at the answers.
So in this case, the flaw of Sarah's arguement is that vagueness of satisfactory standards means that managers may fire for personal conflicts. She is for one, cynically assuming the managers' have bad intentions and have the power to act on these intentions without any reason, and she is ignoring the possibility that vague and difficult to interpret guidelines may actually protect the employees.
To close this loophole, you could say that the supervisors are the only ones with the power to interpret the vagueness. This creates the possibility that the managers have the power to act on their independent views, and it closes the possibility Sarah does not address: that the vagueness may actually defend the employees.
edwardzh313433
Monday, Jun 17 2024
Can someone explain to me why for A there is not an idea that works well in theory but does not work well in practice? I kind of thought of it like this, but I am wondering if there is a more obvious explanation I am missing.
The infinite duplication may be bad, but it doesn't have to be bad. So the notion of this "idea" working well in theory and not in practice does not have to be supported by the stimulus.
edwardzh313433
Monday, Jun 17 2024
Q26 was so subtle. This is the exact sort of trap answer that sets curves.
edwardzh313433
Monday, Jun 17 2024
One general principle that helps with sufficient assumption problems is that if the conclusion of the stimulus offers new reasoning, then that answer choice must mention that new reasoning to be valid. For almost all sufficient answer choice problems that rely on conditional logic, that has to be true. This quickly leads you to C.
I was wrestling though with the conditional logic of this problem. I diagrammed it in the following way.
Domain of Discourse: For Each Action We Perform
Knowledge ←s→ Consequences
---------
Conclusion: If Action Morally Right = Action Best Consequences → Know Action Is Morally Right
I then double checked C. If we know an action has best consequences then we know know all of the consequences. So we need to to start from knowledge ←s→ consequences, given that is our premise. Simply taking the contrapositive get us there. If we don't know all the consequences (same as our premise) then we don't know if an action has best consequences. We are given the if equivalency between best consequences and morally right to be able to draw the conclusion in the argument thereafter.
edwardzh313433
Sunday, Jun 16 2024
Took me more time than it should have to pick C. This really shows the importance of careful diagramming and attention to structure.
edwardzh313433
Sunday, Jun 16 2024
I was between D and E. I picked D because I thought that a low unemployment rate would strengthen the conclusion by suggesting that it would be difficult to hire new staff -- thus blocking the alternate explanation that they could hire new people.
In retrospect, this is too strong of an assumption to make (that low unemployment causing people to move in = harder to hire.) Because a low unemployment rate does not tell you if it is harder to hire specifically for municipal jobs. Moreover, to say that a lot of new people were motivated to move in because of low unemployment does not logically imply anything about the current unemployment rate; so you can't even draw the assumption that low unemployment = harder to hire. Consequently, it does not even really relate at all to the supplied premise of Most City Budgets not allowing new hiring.
The more I think about it, the worse D appears. D is conflating small cities with cities in general, which is almost always a red flag. There could also be other reasons, and so what if that is a reason for why people move to cities in general? It doesn't necessarily have to apply to small cities.
edwardzh313433
Saturday, Jun 15 2024
I did not think that E was that obvious. But that is because I did not parse through the question stimulus carefully enough. I did not see that the counterexample has to apply to the quote, which is rather intuitive in hindsight.
The takeaway is to either skip or slow down on these sort of miscellaneous questions. You need to have a clear sense of what you are looking for before going into the answer choices, or else you are just blindly going through.
edwardzh313433
Saturday, Jun 15 2024
Wow, what a question. Incredible because I noticed the subtle temporal error made in the stimulus, but I was too reliant in the first go around on the mechanical logic structure, which seemed to line up with D the most.
I think my takeaway for this problem, and future PF problems, is to really explicitly list out what the flaws are before going into the answer choices. If you don't know what you are looking for in advance, then fumbling in the dark is hard.
A lot of PF problems also try to create wrong answer choices where the flaw is not the same, but the logical structure of the answer choice seems to mirror the stimulus. Must be wary especially in the later questions.
Is the explanation for explaining why D wrong applicable for other LSAT strengthening questions like this? It seems like a huge assumption to make to think that this is confined to this domain of students?