I thought the flaw here was a little different and more subtle. I definitely agree with JY that the there is definitely some bias involved, I considered that maybe there could be reasons as to why the companies with the VC equipment could serve as unrepresentative, but I think the bigger reason why and the one that made me choose Choice D) is that they are unrepresentative because of the timeshift. We are told that it would not be worthwhile for companies that DO NOT currently have the tech. Maybe it wouldn't be worthwhile because there's some awesome new tech coming out that will make the current tech obsolete, and thus add unnecessary expense when these companies are forced to inevitably upgrade their tech. Thus, the opinions of the companies that ALREADY have the tech are useless. The rest of the choices were just straight up garbage.

Lol "Just realized, STD is great." Love JY

I’ve been up since 6am EST, and it has been the longest three hours of my life. Funny how I’m always complaining about how little time we have every day lol.

This was a real PIECE OF SHIT question. Police me for the caps if you want, but I stand by it. I sat with this question for a bit, but I have really figured out why these choices are all wrong and found a way to be able to explain it to my dumb self. If I can get it, any of you geniuses can. So if you want a good explanation here, buckle up.

I like a complete sucker just ran along with the stimulus was like yup yup, okay, and didn’t really challenge anything in the stim. You have to remember that we are always always always challenging what these bastards put in front of us. We have to. So after blind review, I changed the approach. I said, “okay, why should I believe you scum?” How do we know that we are going to get more flooding and less water to store? Let’s go to the incorrect answer choices first

A) I chose this one in blind review and under timed conditions. This is the SUCKER’S choice. I thought “aha! We were told the PROPORTION of rain would increase, but not the absolute amount. Noooow we have a choice that will give us that guaranteed increase in rain, and now we shall see flooding and less storable water....” WRONG It’s wrong because yes, this answer would be the silver bullet IF YOU BELIEVED THEIR LITTLE ARGUMENT WAS TRUE!!! We do not know if it’s guaranteed that more rain will definitely give us these results in the Rocky Mountains. Maybe the Rockies are atypical or heck, maybe the causal prediction they made just doesn’t happen. Who knows for sure? Let’s keep going.

C) C was very tempting to me at first. But this doesn’t guarantee us anything or strengthen the argument. Here’s why. It’s comparing pockets of the Rockies to each other. Bear with me.

1. What if in those areas of the Rockies with milder winters that have less storable water there is some other reason why the water isn’t storable. Maybe it’s because in those warmer areas there’s like a gaping abyss where all the ice and water falls through and we can’t reach it? Maybe it’s because they just don’t even have ice period, like what if we are comparing the ground level lower regions of the mountains to the peaks where there is a ton of snow and this more storable water. Who knows??

2. Our stimulus talks about an ENTIRE mountain region and about the total amount of storable water collectively. You can’t just compare little pockets to different pockets. You have to compare the same mountainous region during mild and cold and see what happens to the water. That’s what happens in our stimulus, so that’s what we need to test or match here.

D) is trash. Are there mountains in these regions? Like are we comparing Florida to the Rockies here? Who knows.

E) is just complete crap. Who cares? Literally useless. It’s just like some random fun fact. Our task here is to strengthen the Causal story we have in the stimulus. Does this help us bolster the fact that more rain could lead to increased flooding and less water to be stored? No. Gone.

This brings us to CORRECT choice B). It gives us mountainous regions. CHECK. So we are talking about similar areas and entire mountain regions just as we have in the stimulus. AND it gives us a comparison of the amount of flooding and storable water during times when they were warmer and when they were colder. This basically shows us hey, what we are talking about in the stimulus has happened other times in similar bodies of land when the same type of change from colder to milder occurs. It’s the better version of what C) was wrongly trying to do.

It also strengthens by showing us a classic example of Same Cause -> Same Effect to bolster a claim of causation. Hope this helps!

#help Just want to make sure I have this down. I chose D), because I felt it MOST STRENGTHENED the argument, as the stem asks us to do. However, I was really tempted by choice B).

B) I thought strengthened because it implied that the tests were unbiased. I got rid of this because I felt it didn’t strengthen as much as D), which had more of a bearing on the actual conclusion and the question of does more complexity mask lack of taste from lack of fat?

C) was also mildly tempting, I axed it because this had no bearing on fat. Also think about the argument. We are trying to explain why low fat chocolate tastes just as good as the regular fat, when for vanilla it just isn’t the case. Think about this. Let’s say choice C) IS correct. Great, more complex means people like it more. But is vanilla less complex? We still have no idea. We just bolster the premise that the complexity could be why chocolate got better response, but we still are left with a big question mark as to what the deal is with why vanilla had such a big difference in feedback regarding fat content. Is it complex or not?

D) though was my exact prephrase. I said well what about vanilla? If it’s just as complex then this argument is terrible. It needs to be less complex. This is what the argument was after. I got that part.

"But hey, welcome to the ocean" lmfaooo

#help So during a live test, I circled D but then ended up choosing B). In blind review I chose D), but still found B) tempting. Would really appreciate some help here.

I eliminated B) because of the second half; there’s no defense of anyone’s tastes. There might be a defense of abstract painting, in that there’s some VALUE to it, but there’s nothing going on about people’s tastes.

What tripped me up was the first half.. “appealing to an aesthetic principle.” What would an aesthetic principle look like here? I thought that the mention of photography could have been a principle due to the word “OTHERWISE.”

(Appreciate only Exact replica -> photo beats painting)

(Photo NOT beat painting -> NOT appreciate only exact replica)

I GET that we have to infer that photography did not eliminate painting to conclude we don’t only appreciate exact replicas. I’m just really tripped up about the aesthetic principle language since I thought we had one.

I really don't know why here but this one was tricky as hell for me. After reading it, I was like erm... who cares if the adopters and enforcers didn't have the same data we had... Turns out that was exactly what A) was going for. I had to eliminate choices B) and E) to be rock solidly certain that A) was the winner for me.

The negation of A) is what clinches the argument. The negation says that we don't even need to explain the origin of a food prohibition with reference to the understanding of the adopters and enforcers. That OBLITERATES the argument. We were told that we can't explain the origin because the adopters and enforcers didn't have access to our modern data, but the negated version of A) basically says "The data? Pssssht, we don't give a rat's ass about their understanding at ALL, let alone what their understanding would have been if they had this modern data."

B) I eliminated because the negation says that the problems of the society won't lead to the adoptions of contradictory policies.... great, but despite what function the bans served, there could have been a different reason for their origin. Think about that classic Flaw Question we see from time to time, where an author wrongly infers that simply because an action had a result or effect that this effect had to be a motivator of an action -- That the author did the action to bring about that effect. We just don't know the real reason here.

E) Okay... who the hell said anything about technical understanding or lack thereof? Even if, as Negated, these adopters and enforcers had a technical understanding of the medical FUNCTIONS of a prohibition, this brings us right back to square one. What can we learn about the the Origin here?

Tricky ass question here in my opinion, but with time I think I've really become much more sensitive to words like MAY and CAN on MSS Questions. The word MAY is the key to not falling for a lot of the garbage answers here. When I did this one timed I put a tilde on choices A, D, and E. I hope my analysis on these answer choices can help anyone who was in my boat!

A) I was able to eliminate this choice for the same reasons JY did. We don't know for certain why these policies don't contribute to the satisfaction or efficency of managers. All we know is that it MAY be the case that the ability to manipulate their schedules already could be the reason why. HOWEVER, it could just as easily be the case that this isn't why. Thus, we do not know that we would be able to increase the satisfaction or efficiency of those managers who do not have that freedom.

Maybe the real reason why these policies don't help is because these managers are actually sociopaths who don't like that their underlings now have the same freedoms they do? Think of Kevin Spacey in Horrible Bosses lol. There could be any number of reasons why these policies don't jazz the managers, so we cant assume that this one POSSIBLE reason might work in the cases where managers don't have this privilege, as mentioned in A). And so I eliminated.

Now I was down to Choices D) and E).

D) is trash because it's the King Baiter here. We don't know that there is LITTLE correlation between the ABILITY of managers to set their own schedule and their satisfaction. This answer tests your ability to notice a SHIFT between 1) the FREEDOM to manipulate your schedule on its own and 2) the POLICIES in the stimulus. All we know from the stimulus is that these POLICIES do not increase the satisfaction or efficiencies of the managers, and that the author thinks it could be because the policies (2) are REDUNDANT since the managers already have (1). Choice D) is basically targeting (1) here and trying to get you to attribute what we know about (2) to it. You CANNOT do that. We do not know anything about the relationship between (1) and satisfaction and efficiency. Maybe if the managers weren't able to manipulate their schedules they would be miserable as hell!

Choice E) Yes, this one is the winner for a couple of reasons. For starters, it targets the POLICIES or the (2) that we mentioned in choice D). In the stimulus we are told that MOST managers are meh about the policies whereas the nonmanagerial staff are thrilled AF about it! You have to make a slight jump in assuming that there are more nonmanagerial employees... but that's fair to say. There are usually far fewer managers than henchmen in most businesses. Think about law firms -- Way fewer partners associates. Think about the supermarket and the classic Nancy asking for the manager. Ton of cashiers and aisle staff walking around, but you're going to have to wait a few minutes for that one or two available managers to be found lol. So if there are more nonmanegerial employees, and we see increases for them in all these different areas, we can say that these are likely typical... and since these effects are absent in MOST managers, we are good here, can't reliably infer the typical benefits from that group.

I got trapped here between choices A and C during a timed test, but choice A is the better of the two here. A) is exactly the flaw that the argument commits here. C) was EXTREMELY tempting, especially since we are all trained by now to charge after mistaking SUff for NEC flaws. It doesn't work here because nowhere in the argument do we learn of any instance where we have a SUFFICIENT condition for what makes an advertisement EFFECTIVE. All we were given were Necessary conditions all the way around the table. We learned necessary conditions for humor, we learned necessary conditions for effective advertising. So C) is just completely WRONG.

From those shared necessary conditions of "conveying a message," the author just assumes that EFF -> HUM. Or basically that there is only one kind of effective advertising: the humorous kind.

A) gives this to us.

I got tripped up on this one during a timed PT. I was between D) and E). The way I got to D) was by figuring out what was wrong with E) when I compared it to the stimulus.

E) does 2 things wrongly here:

1) Like JY said, we don’t know which of these two allegiances is the longer one. We just know she has liked the politician for a long time. What if the author is the longer allegiance?

2) I didn’t notice Point #1, during the test, but what clinched it for me was the really really strong language of “renounce.” Stronger language is fine on a Principle question, but here, we just straight up do not have Sharon renouncing anyone. To renounce is to completely reject or abandon. We only have the Sharon lowering her estimation of the author. That’s a Much, much weaker statement. Lowering your estimation just means your opinion of them dropped. She could still like the author. No need to renounce anybody here lol

I circled this one and had to come back to it. I left a mark on A) and B), A) was my gut choice, but i didn't like it because of the difference between "educational needs " and "needs." However, since this is a MSS Disagreement question, I just selected it and moved on. B) was a nonsense choice. Remember to read the question stem very carefully. Something like MOST ACCURATELY in a Main Conclusion question, or MOST COMMITTED TO/ MOST SUPPORT on a disagreement, allow you to have a less exact correct answer.

#help I got this one wrong. In blind review I chose C), but I just want to make sure I did for the right reason. Is there a distinction here between qualifying as a medical specialist and qualifying as a REGISTERED medical specialist here? I thought there was. We are told that to qualify as a plain old medical specialist, you need the years of schooling etc. Then we were given one separate requirement to become a REGISTERED medial specialist, and then the conclusion itself only discusses having been qualified as a REGISTERED medical specialist , and therefore having completed the program, as being COMPETENT. There is then a glaring jump from Complete Evaluation -> Competent. Negating C) directly crushes this argument.

I just couldn't figure out why D) or E) were wrong. Is it simply because neither addresses the matter of being REGISTERED or the completion of the evaluation program? I saw negating these 2 choices as just plain old "consistent" with the original argument because they don't damage the relationship between the premise about "REGISTERED doctors and the evaluation" and the conclusion.

D) Negated: "usually 6-10 years is NOT sufficient to render someone competent"... okay seems to even strengthen our argument, because we know qualified REGISTERED med specialists had to complete the evaluation. It leaves the evaluation -> competent bridge alone. Also, think about what this is saying. This answer highlights the distinction between plain old qualified med specialists and those qualified REGISTERED med specialists, because the only thing differentiating them is the evaluation program.

E) Negated: "Usually, 6-10 years is NOT necessary to render someone competent"... okay so maybe the doctors don't actually need all those years of schooling, maybe they actually need fewer or maybe they need something else? Perhaps, something like the evaluation program that the REGISTERED med specialists have would be it? MAYBE the evaluation is THE ONLY thing that can be used to determine whether someone is competent. Negated choice E) leaves the evaluation -> competent bridge still standing, and if anything is more useless than choice D) because we are given COMPETENT as a NECESSARY condition in the original argument. We have no idea of anything necessary to determine it; we only know what's sufficient for it (the evaluation).

Really really appreciate any help here, because I got blindsided during a timed test on this one!

I got caught between A) and B) here, but upon Blind reviewing the answer, I think I can better articulate why I chose A) over B). If you had trouble with B) PLEASE READ THROUGH THIS WHOLE EXPLANATION. It took me a while, and I wrote this out mainly to help other people caught in the same jam.

The stimulus basically thinks that because the Lower cost computers give you 25% profit, that selling let's say 100 low end computers would be better than selling 100 units of a mix of high and low cost computers that have a jumbled up mix of 13% and 25% profits respectively. What this means is that the author is assuming that the individual laptop prices between the two groups of laptops is pretty close, so let's say $1000.

The AUTHOR'S ASSUMPTION is that %s equal real numbers (profits), and their assumption is working with two groups here:

GROUP 1

-If you had JUST the low cost laptops as the author wants, your 100 low cost laptops near $1000 at the 25% profit mark would be clearing a maximum of $250 bucks for you on each laptop giving you roughly $25,000 TOTAL

VS

GROUP 2

-NOW, let's compare this to the other group. No matter what, with your mix of high and low laptops at 13% and 25%, the author is assuming that your profits here CAN'T beat Group 1. That's what the author concludes: that we should do GROUP 1 to maximize profits. Why would they conclude that though??? Because they are looking at the PERCENT and thinking that the percent translates into higher absolute value here.

-Let's just assume that the Higher cost laptops mixed into group 2 are about $1000.50 a piece. That's higher than $1,000... so we are allowed to make that guess. At the 13% mark we would be clearing about $130.65 per computer... almost half of what we would be clearing on the low cost computers. So having these high priced computers thrown into our mix with the low end computer GREATLY reduces the max profit of this group since we are losing HALF of what we could have made profit wise on the sale of a low cost computer. In other words, we aren't going to be able to hit that same $25,000 MAX TOTAL that group 1 could hit due to the half size bullet holes in our profits that the high cost laptops are creating in the places where low cost computers should have stood.

Answer choice B) says that basically we would have had a 50/50 split of that 100, with half being the Low end giving you 25% profit on each sold, and then the other half gives you 13% profit on that other half of the pie. (LOW TOTAL = $12,500; HIGH = $6500 (roughly)] TOTAL here: about $19,000. That's WAAAAY below the MAX of $25,000 that Group 1 would get you. Again, this would be assuming the prices are in line with the author's flaw. On its own, this choice does NOTHING to drive a wedge between the reasoning and the conclusion in the author's argument. If anything, it almost seems as though this isn't something the author fails to consider, since this hit to profits is what the author is trying to avoid.

So... HOW THE HELL do we hurt the reasoning here? Well, the percents are the key. We don't know how far above or below $1000 the high or low laptops are. If the low cost are really like $20 for each unit and the high priced ones are $14,000 for each unit.... wouldn't you want 13% of $14,000 rather than 25% ($5) of the $20 computers? We just need one or both of the groups to stray very far towards either extreme to knock the author on his @$$. This is what answer choice A) gives us.

In fact, answer choice B) would need answer choice A) to be true in order for it to be able to have any chance to hurt the argument. On its own, B) doesn't introduce any information that could affect the author's assumptions. A) brings us that new information that can do damage. Hope this helps!

#help I got this one through very dumb luck, at first. In hindsight, I can see the argument for why B) is correct. The other 4 choices are just complete trash, the problem is this business with refining and what not. I did a poor job of absorbing the stimulus, and I just want to make sure I have this down.

Facts:

1. We know the Senegal gold was the PUREST KNOWN and did not need to be refined.

2. We know the Senegal gold constituted MOST of the gold coins minted in Spain back then.

3. Senegal gold = 92%, 92% = Senegal

4. We know that the Senegal gold was NEVER REFINED, but that higher purity coins got minted.

What does this mean? How could we get coins of higher purity than the purest unrefined gold at that time? We HAD to have been refining gold that was less than 92%. Picture an 89% gold source. We refine that, and now the purity of the gold in that coin jumps to say 96%.

Think I've got this now. Initially, I was like hey man, how do we know that for certain? What about other higher purity sources that we minted or refined further? I had forgotten about Fact 1. Fact 1 rules out that possibility and Fact 3 rules out the possibility of other sources of 92% gold at the time. So we HAD to have been refining and minting gold of purity that was less than 92% to yield coins with purity of higher than 92%. B) is the winner.

For Reading Comp, reading articles from The Economist and treating them like RC passages in my spare time (usually in bed before going to sleep) I would do like 3 or 4 of these. That and learning when to skip got me a -3 on test day. I used to get anywhere form -7 to -13 on RC.

I had a lot of friends who applied to both schools this year with LSAT scores in the mid 160s and gpas in the 3.5-3.6ish range. With your numbers, a full ride to cardozo is likely guaranteed, and for Fordham I would say at least half tuition very conservatively. Your LSAT score puts you above Fordham's median and that GPA is super high. Best of luck!

I got this one wrong. I chose A instead of B.

We are trying to select a statement that is unsupported by the stimulus. A is wrong because we are told that the deepest mathematical understanding is abstract. I didn't like that choice A shifted terms and gave us "final understanding," but the stimulus does tell us that we are omitting the 4 choices that receive "some support." While the two terms are not identical I think they are close enough to say that choice A does receive SOME support from the argument.

As for choice B), I got tripped up by it. Its something that could be true. In my head,after reading the question stem, I was looking for something a little harsher that might contradict the stimulus or be some weird odd statement that had absolutely nothing to do with the stimulus. I found B to be kind of tricky in its wording, but what its saying is that mastery of manipulating symbols means you could mean you don't have any mathematical understanding. In my head I was like "Yeah that could be true!" So like a dummy, I crossed it out. My mindset should have been, what does the stimulus have to say about this? Nothing? Okay, gone.

I think I've got this one down, but I'd appreciate any input from you geniuses!

I have never related so much to anything else in my life. It's so hard to explain this struggle to other people, family, friends, etc. This is a truly awesome community we have here :) We've got this!

#help I got caught between B) and C) here.

C) is wrong. Full stop. We know that it was "extremely common" for artists of M's era to keep adding to their frescoes even after they had dried. However, we don't know how integralthe later additions to the frescoes were. We just know that it happened. It's tricky because in the stimulus we are talking about what M intended, which to us could be like "oh it's important, need to make sure we keep that intent pure" etc lol. However, we have absolutely no idea, even if M decided to add to his painting later, and even if the additions were what he originally "INTENDED," whether they were "INTEGRAL" or not.

For example, what if M is literally just adding some small bushes here or there, drawing in another little person, etc? Would these intended little details in the corner or the background be integral when you have some huge, glowing, dwarfing religious character with a peculiar expression at the center of the painting performing an important biblical allusion? Doubt it lol.

For B), I was bothered by "Unlikely" in this answer choice at first, especially since I try to be cautious with stronger wording on MSS Questions; however, this works here. "Unlikely" works because we know that it was "EXTREMELY COMMON" for artists of M's time to add to their dried frescoes. Why should we exempt M from that "extremely common" group? Chances are, if it was common practice for artists of his time to do this, then he'd probably fall into that group, thus making choice B) consistent with the stimulus.

I chose choice B) correctly here, but I was tempted by A) at first. I got all blinded by the fact that the question group is part of the MSS hoemwork; however, remember, there is some gray area between the Main Conclusion and MSS Q types. Choice A) feels more like a clean MSS Q correct answer choice; however, our Q stem here says it's asking us for a Conclusion, an implied one at that. Does that sound familiar? It should! Think of some of those outlier Main Conclusion questions that have an implied or unstated conclusion as a correct answer choice; they always end up having a question stem that asks you to select the answer that "most accurately expresses" the Main Point. Use the same strategy that you would use on a question stem like that for this one, and then you'll see B) is definitely the winner here.

I was down to choices C) and D) here, so I hope this helps anyone else who was in a similar spot. D) was my exact prephrase, but C) was bothering me because my derpy self was like "hey, yeah, I remember royalties being a larger part of the cost, yeah sounds like something I read." You need to read carefully. My biggest problem is that I can sometimes get lazy in my attempts to zip through questions, sacrificing accuracy for speed foolishly.

C) talks about the CUSTOMER and not what the STORE is paying. We know that for stores, MOST of the cost of getting the movies results from having to pay the royalties. We have no idea how that cost gets passed along to the CONSUMER when they rent the copies.

#help Just want to make sure I have the reasoning down here after getting this one wrong. I get why the other choices are wrong,but the language of C) is tripping me up a little bit.

C) When I did this question initially, I got so hung up on the exact language of "half the average serum cholesterol level." However, Even as I write this explanation out, I can see how awesome this choice was. It is weak AS HELL, which makes it perfect for MSS. The "Not Necessarily" in the answer choice allows so much leeway that they could almost say anything and get away with it here aside from in that 1/4th window where we know we have a direct relationship between Fat consumption and SC levels. That's exactly what happens here. We are outside that window at the half of the fat in the North American diet, so we have no idea where that SC level will fall, and we especially don't know where it would fall compared to the AVERAGE SC level.

BUT I still don't like the bringing in of the concept of "average serum cholesterol levels" in this answer choice, since the only average we were talking about here was the average North American diet. Is the mention of average serum cholesterol levels appropriate because we are talking about the average diet and because fat consumption is "ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT FACTORS" affecting SC Levels? Or am I just overthinking here, since the above paragraph pretty much nails it?

Any advice or insight is welcome and appreciated! Thanks in advance!

#help Just want to make sure that I've got this one down. I circled C) and was like 98% sure of it, but I threw a tilde onto choice E).

C) makes sense. We know that for the sponges to survive there couldn't be strong currents. I didn't like that the answer choice said "weak," as "not strong" could end up meaning normal. I thought it was a tad extreme, but it still definitely falls into the idea of being Most Strongly Supported.

E) I thought this was wrong because:1) we are never told anything about large clusters of sponges. 2) All we know is that the sponges avoid re-ingesting the water that THEY just filtered. Individual sponges do this. However, we do not know what happens in a communal setting. Maybe two or three sponges next to each other can ingest some of the water that their neighbor buddy sponges just ejected out. 3) We also can't say that NO sponges live in large colonies. What if there are large colonies where the current is of moderate strength, and that current always knocks the ejected ingested water downstream before any of the neighbor sponges even have an opportunity to suck it in.

How does this reasoning sound? Really appreciate any insight here!

#help I got this one wrong after getting down to A) and E). My gut really really liked A), but I thought it wasn't right because of the normative "should not" in the answer choice. After watching the explanation, I still couldn't figure this one out, but in hindsight I think I figured out why we should go for A) and not E):

First, the question stem says "MOST ACCURATELY EXPRESSES the Main Conclusion." Throughout a lot of my prep, I've been noticing that on Main Conclusion questions with this particular question stem, there is often an answer that feels more like a MSS Quetion answer choice. It can be a little more vague. It can be a little looser. It can sound like more of an inference or paraphrase, and I think in this case, it can be implied .

A) With that question stem in mind, I think we can pull that "citizens should not neglect to vote." We are told that valuable things will be lost if we don't, and on top of that we are later told that it wouldn't be right not to.

E) In hindsight, while the only real con of A) is that it isn't explicitly stated, I believe that E) has way more strikes against it. STRIKE 1, we have no idea about "dishonesty." We were only told of theft and not voting. STRIKE 2 , we don't know about any "other societies" here but democratic ones. STRIKE 3 Even if we granted theft = dishonesty or that voting = public duty (we know this in our world, but duty wasn't mentioned once in this stim), the text of this answer choice couldn't be the Main Conclusion because the ideas in it are used as premises.

And that's the ball game, I hope someone can comment or critique this! Appreciate any insight here!