Skipping questions (really just LR) that I didn't get right away/within ~15 seconds. I only started getting high 160s and low 170s when I started doing that. Huge turning point for me in studying!

Also, and I think it was David that posted about this a while back, but whenever something would distract me or I felt really nervous during practice questions or PTs I would just say in my head, "I don't care." I tried to do this in real life too with daily annoyances, and it really helped me on test day to stay calm and focused.

Good luck!

#help

1. I don’t see why Barbara disagreeing with Rhett’s logic means Barbara disagrees with Rhett’s conclusion.

2. To me, B and D are pretty much the same—for B we don’t know if Barbara disagrees with Rhett’s conclusion, just how she got there. And for D we don’t know if Rhett would disagree with Barbara’s conclusion (except in my eyes we kind of do based on the way he uses analogous logic).

Can anyone clarify their thought process here?

Because it's saying with or without conscious awareness, humans are able to/can exhibit complex, goal-oriented behavior. There isn't really a conditional relationship here, in other words there isn't anything that triggers another.

This is different from a sentence like, "I can't sing without a microphone." Being able to sing necessitates/triggers having a microphone here.

It's pretty subtle and intuitive in my opinion, but words like "can" shed light on whether or not there is a conditional statement.

Two things come to mind:

I'm not 100% confident on this but I get the sense that the causation comes from the phrase "tend to," although that is only used in the first part of the conditional lawgic you've laid out (news media rarely covers local politics thoroughly + local politics is usually conducted secretly → isolates local politicians to constituents). I do think the rest of it can be conditional...

But I do think that answer choice E is incorrect because of the word "causes." I believe a contrapositive and conditional statements in general mean that because one thing doesn't/didn't happen, it means another could not have, not that it causes the other to not. So, if resident participation is not discouraged, it means that local politicians could not have been isolated, not that resident participation not being discouraged causes local politicians to not be isolated.

In my eyes Powell is saying that the reason private waste-removal companies offer comparable service is because they are more efficient than public waste-removal companies.