Yes! Any time you see usually, that is the equivalent of most / more than half.

Same.

Yes

I fell for this trap as well, and I think it was placed there by design. Well, I know it was placed there by design haha. It looks like the classic strengthen type of answer that rules out a competing explanation, but I think JY nails it here. You would expect more unrest in the places with greater climate instability because unrest goes hand in hand with the fall of Rome.

I read it like you did which is that the unrest could be potentially an alternate cause of the fall of Rome, but the answer choice doesn't say that. Rather, the stimulus says that 250 to 550 ENCOMPASSES Rome's decline and fall, so this AC would have to be amended to something like "There was not X event in the years leading up to 250 A.D. that resulted in unrest." I think that would strengthen the argument, albeit very minimally.

My thoughts exactly. I was conflicted between (A) and (E) and ended up switching from (E) to (A) before moving on. (E) requires some pretty heavy assumptions without background knowledge.

Definitely no more PTs this close to test day! Especially given that your last PT went so well. Ride the high of that PT, and stop studying. If you absolutely feel the need to study, then focus on confidence boosting. Drill some easy games that you've done before and likewise with easy LR questions. Good luck!

This question proves to me how much luck and random variance can help or hurt on this test. As a philosophy major, I had no problem with "epistemology" or this question in general, so I was pretty shocked to see the analytics. I think it all balances it out in the end, but it's still pretty crazy to me how much outside knowledge can play a role in performance.

Also, another way to assess the contradiction issue for this question. Let's say we were trying to define "US politics" and similar to this argument, we decided to use a rudimentary definition of "the political beliefs held by US politicians." Well, of course that set is now going to include contradictory beliefs! Nonetheless, it wouldn't be wrong to say that that set accurately represents US politics (to some degree). Likewise to politics, philosophy is built on contradictory beliefs, so naturally it is completely consistent for a set of philosophical beliefs to contain contradictions because that is intrinsic to what philosophy is.

I laughed out loud when I saw answer choice (B), considering that this exam was administered in May 2020... LSAT writers most definitely knew what they were doing there.

I chose (B) timed and in blind review, but I still couldn't figure out why (C) was incorrect. This explanation did it for me. Thank you so much!

Yep, this is exactly right. I'm surprised JY didn't touch on this. There's a domain shift from "working population" to factory workers here. In the stimulus, increasing the minimum wage would free up disposable income for a large portion of the working population which is the whole reason there's expected to be a rise in demand for consumer goods. If the ENTIRE working population was making significantly more than the minimum wage already, then that would 100% weaken the argument. (C) only talks about factory workers though, and we don't know how much of the working population they make up.

We only care about factory workers in the sense that those are the jobs that would suddenly increase, but the impact of min. wage on these jobs specifically doesn't actually matter.

@idilbarre698 said:

Ok not to be rude but literally who cares if the moderators asked that the info not be shared. It's kind of annoying to keep info like this behind a pay wall but if anyone who went to the seminar is willing to share the info ($$$) please message me.

They specifically said not to because they want to reward the people who took the time to attend. Plus, sorry, not gonna do Dave and Jon dirty like that.

This was really helpful, thank you!

I got this wrong under timed conditions, mainly because I didn't have quite enough time to evaluate each answer choice, but this is exactly how I thought of (B) during BR as well. JY's explanation makes sense too, but this explanation seems like the more intuitive approach especially under timed pressure.

I did, but it was a combination of POE and dumb luck. This section was just insane though. I still ended up getting -5 on the section and my worst PT score because of it!

Yep!

Just checked LawHub, and there's only 26 questions for the RC section for this PrepTest.

I chose (B) both the first time through and in blind review, but I have the same problem with it. I almost chose (A) in blind review because of the assumption in (B) that avoiders will for sure encounter some seekers at some point. Luckily, I couldn't rationalize picking (A), so I picked (B) both times. Nice to see someone else caught this though.

Yep! I thought of these assumptions before seeing the assumption in answer choice (A). Luckily, I didn't fall for any of the trap answer choices.

Not just some, but all actually. The negation would be that every single crow shrieking and dive bombing is a crow that was previously trapped. You can see how that drastically destroys the argument because that would mean zero evidence for crows being able to communicate threats to other crows.

I honed in on (B) within 20 seconds and was almost just going to immediately move on, but I felt compelled to read the other answer choices and ultimately switched my answer to (D)... need to learn to trust my intuition more.