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Hello all. Just finishing the SA question module in the Core Curriculum, and it's kicking my butt. I'm wondering if it's best to basically start it again from the beginning and really try to grok it, or push on and come back later in the hopes that it will make more sense.
Or maybe it's like any new & intense thing: you start out blazing but at some point you hit your first plateau, and you either have to take a break and come back fresh, or just grind through it. Thoughts?
Which answer, if true, most strongly supports the weary student's concerns? :)
Or you can apply the Jackass Negation: One should always play a practical joke on someone, especially if it shows contempt and/or could bring significant harm to that person. ;)
Seems like adverbs often kill an answer choice. "Deliberately" (in answer choice D) narrows the applicability of the rule and opens up other possibilities that were unaddressed in the stimulus. Once we start specifying HOW something is done, it seems like we often introduce restrictions that the stimulus doesn't contemplate. Just something I've noticed....
Do words like "probably" and "some" in the conclusion make the conclusion more plausible?
E failed in my mind because of the final clause about "spruces and firs in SUCH forests." Meaning, all the trees are in the same forest, though E tries to talk about maples in a DIFFERENT forest from spruces and firs.
Is it fair to say that "most" in any stimulus correlates to "probably" in an answer choice? (All the answer choices here used some kind of "probably" statement.) Could it go the other way as well? A "probably" in the stimulus and a "most" in the correct answer choice?
This is almost too much analysis. I feel like on these Main Conclusion questions, you can just keep it simple: Identify the conclusion; identify the answer choice that best re-states the conclusion. Badabing.
Seems like Step 4 can be dangerous. Lots of times I get an idea of what the answer "should" look like, but then I read the answer choices and one or more of them will open up an idea or possibility that I hadn't considered, but I'm kind of "married" to the idea I had before reading the answer choices. Seems like we bias ourselves with this, possibly away from the correct answer.
@msfro He skips that first "negate/sufficient" step ("Unless" = Group 3) and deriving its contrapositive, and jumps immediately to G --> B. I did those other prelim steps as well. We're not wrong, but I think the idea is to be able to recognize these patterns and jump to the later parts of the reasoning, just as a time-saving trick.
Q5: I ended up (in english) with "Chess is sometimes not the best analogy...," which doesn't seem to comport with the written explanation but DOES seem to comport with the video explanation. (The "sometimes" allows for the possibility of a tie with other analogies.) Thoughts?
Dunno if this is relevant, but:
"Many" and "few" could represent different ranges of likelihood if there's an expectation built in. Example: "Many Senators voted against proclaiming today 'National We Love Our Mothers Day.'" We would easily expect 100% of Senators to vote for that, but let's say only 80% did. In this context, "many" = 20%. Am I too far in the weeds? Is this a trap we need to look out for in LSAT questions?
Heads, I win. Tails, you lose. Those sentences do indeed mean the same thing!
Q5: The last sentence merely re-states the first part of the first sentence. Hard to distinguish between the two statements and figure out which supports which, since they're saying the same thing.
@NikiLakestani I think we need to get to the point where science-y prompts (or anything else that might turn us off) aren't the point. Rather, it's the patterns in the questions that we want to identify. The details are just widgets to fill out the form of the question. Don't sweat the science, cuz it ain't about the science. It's about the relationships between assertions.
Does the same "negation test" that works for Necessary Assumptions questions work for Sufficient Assumption Qs? For a NA Q, you negate the answer choice and see if that destroys the argument. Maybe for SA Qs, it's more like if you negate the answer the choice, the argument is not "destroyed" but is simply not guaranteed? Or is this just introducing more complexity than we already have, as I'm still struggling with this question and the issues it raises. Maybe the better approach for SA Qs is just to keep it simple and take the answer choice as-is and see if it guarantees the conclusion? Thanks.