I took the March LSAT and the proctor situation actually preemptively stressed me out so I made sure to be very explicit with my proctor that if he needed to interrupt me at any point, that he would first have to pause my time before we talked about anything. Thankfully, my proctor was a rockstar and left me completely alone, but you're definitely allowed to state what you need, especially because any interruptions could disrupt your focus and mess up your timing.

Is this the correct way to negate E? #help

AC E (as it is): some steel plants reduce bills --> converting heat to electricity

AC E (negated): some stee plants reduce bills and converting heat to electricity

"Only if" is a Group 2, so the conditions are just thrown in the necessary condition. "If and only if" is a biconditional.

I typically find that with these 5 star flaw questions, there are sometimes secondary or even tertiary mini-flaws, but the one we're tasked with identifying is the extremely "obvious" primary one!

@laurazh3594 - I was having trouble understanding how we can equate whether a policy is "fair to all" with D's "understanding the social implications of political policies." When I thought "fair to all," I thought it could mean anything from social implications to economical or technological so thought this AC was too limiting?

#help

What I've been trying to do is just do 3 question sprints at a time. For example, I've noticed that I can be really bad with Weaken questions so I start with the 2-3 level difficulty questions to make sure it's VERY clear to me what the premise + conclusion + assumptions are. Once I feel comfortable with those, I move to the harder level questions and slowly go from there, taking the time to dissect each question similarly because anatomically, all these questions are the same. They just up the difficulty by using harder subject material or making the assumptions more subtle or have the right AC hinge on a specific detail. It's been helping a bit for me!

@rz320384 This is really helpful, as I also chose C. Would it be fair to say that C is almost like an additional consideration or issue once the government theoretically already provided the money, but doesn't actually do anything to weakening the main conclusion that "the govt should be the sole provider of funds"?

#help

Stimulus:

In a PFM, it's 100% guaranteed max total utility will happen (but we don't know what exactly will be required - will it require hundreds of years of rewriting rules? Will it require a civil war? Everyone to do 400 pushups a day? We don't know).

So, if you try another option to bring about PFM, then clearly you're not choosing the most likely path to bring about PFM.

Thinking:

Well, the fact that something is 100% to happen is not always the same as being the most likely for something to happen once you add additional context. Saw some great analogies below, but I literally just thought about a kingdom where someone could just say "let there be max utility" and it happened, vs getting over to PFM would be so much harder and therefore, max utility would be much harder to get to.

ACs C and D:

C - fails to consider that the way most likely to achieve a particular end (aka PFM) may not be the only way to achieve that end (max utility) - Not descriptively accurate. Author DOES consider that max utility could be achieved by other types of economies.

D - presumes without providing justification that trying to bring about a condition (that will ensure the achievement of an end aka max utility) must always be the way most likely to achieve that end (PFM). Right, the author ignores the context of what that country is going through to bring about max utility.

Would love if anyone could let me know if there was something incorrect about my thinking!

Got this question wrong because of how much each of these ACs required additional leaps of logic (albeit, some way smaller than others). Definitely seems like these 'Weaken/strengthen except' questions have a way lower threshold necessary when it comes to making assumptions

My thoughts on A vs B

I thought about the possible additional considerations the same way JY did, but focused moreso on the first, which is that what if he only got 3 complaints from the town in general. Then, I kept following this train of logic to think about what if he got 1,000 compliments and only 3 complaints, therefore focusing on the praise vs complaint ratio for Moore.

That led to me A (which I did read incorrectly), thinking that it meant that the argument failed to consider how many of Moore's customers offered positive feedback. HOWEVER, that's not what A says. A talks about those customers interests, which is quite broad and could mean anything, such as maybe these customers are all interested in plywood or something really random like that.

With my initial train of thought, my mind basically re-contorted A to mean something it actually didn't, so I didn't even really think about the validity of B because I was already predisposed.

I struggled with C and E for a long time, ultimately eliminating C because it said "modernism" rather than abstract art. How are we supposed to tie modernism to abstract art? #help

I would also look into getting accommodations for the LSAT if that applies to you! Could help you significantly.

I tried to come up with an analogous arg - can someone tell me if this sounds about right? (with glitter and tomatoes, the flaw is a lot more obvious):

P: When tomatoes haven't grown well,, it's always when glitter wasn't sprinkled on the tomatoes

C: Clearly, the success of tomato growth requires glitter

#help

JY mentioned that for B, the "repeal" portion was fine, but that was what made me eliminate it because that felt too strong? Like it could've just resulted in a modification of the statute, not a "repeal." #help

I don't think JY's explanation for C actually speaks to why it's wrong - basically if SUVs carry on average more folks per car and we still know that the SUVs are generally safer than smaller cars, then we have to make an assumption that for some reason they're still getting in more accidents or something. Basically, C adds another puzzle piece but doesn't tell us what we need to reconcile the two explanations.

Please add me!! :)

Could someone re-explain why using something other than magnetite is good for independent verification? I just really do not understand that third premise in the passage around the correlation between the ages of the earth's magnetic reversals and the striping pattern. #help

Conclusion: Can't be true that these people painted their current diets

Premise 1: B/c they had to eat sea animals if they made the trek from and to the islands

Premise 2: There are no paintings that unambiguously depict sea creatures

ACs:

a) They could've also just eaten land animals on the island (and eaten sea animals when making the trek), so conclusion could still hold

b) Maybe some of the missing cave paintings had pics of sea animals, so conclusion could still hold

c) Ok? this is almost a neutral AC because the argument is that since there were no paintings of sea creatures, then the theory couldn't be true. All this AC tells us is what the paintings did show (many land animals). What if the paintings also depicted lots of different types of rocks? Just context.

d) Preserving meats could mean that maybe the meats were painted, but they just didn't look "unambiguously" like sea creatures

e) If this was from the original people who ate meat of land animals, then makes sense that there may not be pics of sea creatures

That's an assumption you made - the only effect the fertilizer made was that it caused farmers to abandon growing the green manure crops. The abandonment itself led to poor soil structure, not the use of the fertilizer.

Stimulus:

-chemical fertilizers made farmers abandon green manure (GM) crops

-Because of abandonment, soil structure is poor

C: To improve soil structure, farmers need to stop using chemical fertilizer.

Well, why can't they just go back to growing green manure crops and still use the chemical fertilizer?

ACs: (Negated version)

A - 50% or less of farmers who abandon using fertilizer won't grow alfalfa. Okay, that's fine, maybe they can just grow some other GM crop

B - Applying fertilizer to GM has positive effect on the crops' growth. Okay great, how does that affect soil structure?

C - The most important factor that influences soil quality is NOT the structure. Cool, we weren't talking about the quality anyways

D - Fertilizers don't have a destructive effect on the soil structure. Yeah that's fine; the arg is talking about abandonment of growing the GM crop

E - Translated into conditional: grow --> abandon. Negated is: grow and /abandon. So there are some farmers out there who both grow GM and don't abandon fertilizer. If this were true, then why does the conclusion have to be true?

Interested!

#help

I initially chose E and can see why it's wrong now, but when I was negating E, I still had a hard time thinking that the negated form of E "destroyed" the argument because it seemed like there's still a gap between being able to exercise imagination vs actually "doing so less frequently."

My thinking was:

Negated D: Something fills the gap left by radio as a medium for exercising imagination.

Sure, but just because something (e.g., podcasts, books, etc) fills the gap left by radio, then how could we conclude that today's viewers don't exercise their imagination frequently? It could still be true that podcasts fill the gap, but today's people don't actually engage or listen to podcasts, so the argument still holds.

I know something is wrong with my thinking, but could someone please clarify?

Is #7 basically an NA question? #help