This reminds me of the bees and the color vision question (I forget which PT exactly, maybe one in the high 30s). The correct answer to that question also eliminated an alternative hypothesis, thereby strengthening the conclusion. I got that question wrong too lol.

Parallel argument:

"There are new restaurants and old ones. Although most new restaurants have had few if any negative reviews, very few have been in existence long enough for reviews on yelp to be written. On the other hand, the old restaurants usually have long-standing reviews for indicating their food's degree of tastiness. So we'll get better food at an old restaurant than a new one."

But the actual degree of tastiness is never mentioned. Maybe the food at the old restaurants is terrible and that's why there's a billion reviews on yelp, all warning you not to go there.

Really though LSAT made up the existence of babblers and then found this on wikipedia: "The Old World babblers or Timaliidae are a family of mostly Old World passerine birds. They are rather diverse in size and coloration, but are characterised by soft fluffy plumage."

Premise: Sometimes you read a poem and you believe that poem expresses contradictory ideas. It can be a good poem, a bad poem, or a great poem. Regardless, there's seems to be a contradiction in this poem.

(For example, maybe the poem talks about nature. The beginning of the poem goes on and on about how amazing it is to go camping. But then you keep reading and the poem SEEMS to say that actually, nvm, nature sucks. There's a ton of mosquitoes, you miss plumbing, it's really humid, and oh god there's bears. So you believe that the poem is expressing contradictory ideas.)

Premise: HOWEVER, authors who write great poems (HD, TS Eliot, Wallace Stevens) ​do not intend on conveying contradictory ideas in their poems.

Conclusion: Therefore, the meaning of the poem is not necessarily what the author intended to convey.

Gap: Just because I believe The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock expresses contradictory ideas, is the poem itself actually contradictory? In other words, just because I believe this poem is expressing contradictory ideas, are these contradictory ideas actually part of the poem's meaning? What if I'm just a terrible reader and I made up a bunch of interpretations that aren't actually part of the poem? Negate answer choice E and the stim falls apart.

Dear LSAC - I majored in English--why do expect me to understand what "effective hourly wage" means?!

The problem with B is that it takes for granted the speaker is right/the conclusion is true (that the scholars who are anti-Shakespeare are indeed motivated purely by snobbery). If motivated by pure snobbery --> /motivated by historical evidence. But this conditional statement isn't the flaw, the flaw is that we don't even know if these scholars are motivated by pure snobbery or not.

D addresses the actual flaw (you can't just presume they're all snobs, especially since only "many/some" of the anti-Shakespeare scholars are descendents). Maybe they think Bacon wrote the plays bc someone found a suggestive letter or some other piece of historical evidence...so it's NOT pure snobbery motivating these anti-Shakespeare scholars.

Argument/conclusion: pure snobbery motivates anti-Shakespeare scholars bc some of them are descendents of Bacon or other aristocrats.

B: The argument's flaw is that it assumes if you're motivated purely by snobbery (grants the conclusion) you can't also be motivated by historical evidence.

D: Actually, the argument's flaw is that assumes these people are motivated purely by snobbery when maybe they found a letter stating that Bacon wrote all these plays.

Finally my Master's in English Lit helped me...

Hey! Don't know if this is exactly what you're looking for, but I was scoring reasonably well, took the June LSAT, and then promptly lost all motivation to study. After scoring badly on a PT a week or so after the June LSAT, I realized that I needed to take a break. So I took a week off studying, then came back and started hitting my more recent scores. I would suggest that you try to take a few days off (if you don't feel comfortable taking a whole week, why not just 5 days--nothing LSAT related). Alternatively, instead of taking full PTs, try drilling specific sections. Hope this helps!

@

I wish I could've scored -3 on that LR section. Unfortunately I have a feeling I got anywhere from 5-7 questions wrong. I would much rather have had two RC sections because RC is my strongest area (followed by LG). I don't think I found the Sisyphus question hard, it was just one of the most memorable ones for me.

Someone please cradle my broken body and tell me it'll be okay.

Did anyone find the LR (conspiracy theories, Sisyphus, Norway/Sweden, dark bird feathers) really really really hard? Or was it just me because I'm terrible at LR?

Damn you, LR...

Rejected E for two reasons during the test:

1. The missing gap is between genuine happiness/the happy life and the good life. Just because you have a sense of approval of your character and projects doesn't automatically mean you have a morally virtuous life. E.g. deriving happiness from a project such as stealing groceries from old ladies. That isn't morally virtuous...

2. Negating E ("Material well-being DOES increase one's sense of approval of one's character and projects") doesn't hurt the argument. The stim never states that you must REJECT material well-being. So this negation is consistent with the argument. The main thing you have to do here is link/bridge the gap. Focus on that. It's okay if owning a dozen gold-plated bidets makes you genuinely happy.

The answer choice C talks about people who eat one half the cholesterol and fat of the average North American (NA) diet.

We don't know if the serum cholesterol (SC) of people who eat one-half the cholesterol/fat of the average NA diet would be exactly one half...because the average NA diet is OVER the threshold--and after passing the threshold, the serum cholesterol no longer increases proportionally to the level of fat and cholesterol in your diet.

Instead, the SC just increases "gradually" and we don't know how much that is. And someone who's eating half as much cholesterol and fat as in the NA diet is ALSO past the threshold (because remember, one-fourth of the average NA diet IS the threshold). And if that's the case, then much like the people eating the full NA diet, their SC also increases "gradually." We don't know by how much. So they don't necessarily have exactly half the average serum cholesterol level.

For example (I just made these numbers up), BELOW the threshold:

5 SC and 5 fat/cholesterol

AT THE THRESHOLD:

10 SC and 10 fat/cholesterol

AFTER the threshold (where SC increases gradually EVEN IF the consumption of fat/cholesterol in the diet increases sharply):

12 SC and 15 fat/cholesterol

14 SC and 30 fat/cholesterol

17 SC and 45 fat/cholesterol

21 SC and 60 fat/cholesterol (average NA diet)

Let's say the average NA diet is 60 fat/cholesterol (which is past the threshold). Then someone eating "half of the fat/cholesterol of the average NA diet," or 30 fat/cholesterol (half the NA diet), would be at 14 SC instead of 21 SC. As you can see, 14 SC isn't half of 21 SC. Which is why it's okay to say answer choice C.

The art historian says:

"There's a Renaissance painting depicting aristocrats in historic battle. We discovered a self-portrait of a well-known artist early in his career, dated to the same year as the battle painting was created. One of the figures in the battle scene closely resembles the young man in the self-portrait. Conclusion: therefore it's likely that the person who painted the self-portrait also painted the battle scene."

A: how does this weaken? I'm sure there were a lot of other people who were in their early 20s during the Renaissance and that some of there were the same age as the young painter.

B: this also does nothing because it's consistent with the conclusion. imagine yourself saying this to the art historian. he would just say, "okay, so what? it can be true that most people are in the painting look like historical figures AND this one particular young dude painted this painting and painted himself in as a joke."

C: so I think this answer choice is suggesting that the young painter was a live model for this particular painting, not the actual painter? yet once again, this is consistent with the argument's conclusion. it's such a vague answer lacking in specifics--just because it was a common practice in ye olden days doesn't mean that it applies to this particular situation! the art historian could say, "so what? yes it was common to use live models AND this dude painted this battle painting." maybe the young dude used live models for his other works. or maybe he didn't use live models at all because he was a rebel.

D: weakens!

E: the thing is, it's a painting of a historic battle, not a relic or a piece of cloth torn from a historical figure that's been carefully handed down from one generation to another. who cares how long ago the battle happened. who cares if it happened years ago before the artist was born. presumably he and others still learned about this battle in their history classes. aren't there a billion paintings of Jesus floating around? it's not like ALL of the people who painted them were alive when Jesus was. and the second reason this doesn't really matter is because this painting isn't depicting the historic battle down to its very last detail--instead, it's a painting of aristocrats in the historic battle. like they were copy and pasted in.

"Pressured nerve -- causes --> nerve inflammation -- causes --> pain. A cortisone injection resulted in significant pain relief. Ergo, pressure on the nerve in question was causing the patient's back and leg pain."

But getting rid of the effect of a cause (pain) doesn't necessarily get rid of the cause itself (pressured nerve), so the way I read it was that you can't conclude anything about what was the actual cause.

"One possible explanation for why our applicant pool is shrinking is because students believe that the quality of education offered at X University (ours) isn't as high as that offered by institutions with higher tuition. So if we want to increase the size of our applicant pool, we need to raise our tuition and fees."

A: this must be true. otherwise, the conclusion would fall apart.

B: I was tempted by this, but actually, this doesn't have to be true. it just has to be what the students and their parents believe. maybe the quality of a university education is entirely independent of the tuition charged by the university. but the president's plan would still work because the students and parents believe it is dependent. what they believe doesn't have to be the actual case or the reality.

C: this just doesn't have to be true. conclusion: if we want to increase size of applicant pool --> must raise tuition and fees. this answer is, increase in tuition and fees --> larger applicant pool (guarantee = sufficient). it's almost like a weird, horrible Mistaken Reversal of the conclusion.

D: there is no additional explanation for the university's shrinking applicant pool. negate this! there IS an additional explanation. so what? as JY mentioned, it's not the case that there only ever has to be one explanation for what's happening. don't fall into the same trap as LSAT speakers, who believe that there is only one single, absolute cause for an effect. there can be multiple causes for one effect (or one cause and multiple effects).

E: the amount charged by the university for tuition HAS increased in recent years (I negated the answer choice). OK...so? just because it's already increased doesn't mean that we can't increase it again. or, put another way...maybe over the past few years, the university has increased tuition from $100 by 10 dollars. that's it. meanwhile, Oxford charges like 9250 pounds ($11,000+). the president's argument still stands: we can still increase our tuition this year even though last year we increased it by 10 dollars (maybe this time we'll increase it by 5000 dollars instead of 10 dollars). i.e. just because we increased our tuition last year doesn't mean we can never increase it again. in fact, why not just keep increasing it and make it impossible for anyone to graduate debt-free?

I got this one wrong. Agh!

A: so what if people spend as much time watching TV today as people spent listening to radio back in ye olden days? the stim never talks about "how much time" you spend watching TV or listening to radio bc that's entirely irrelevant to the question of whether millenials today regularly exercise their imaginations.

B: the problem is that this answer could be read to include radio drama ("a form of popular entertainment"), in which case this argument makes no sense.

C: this misses the point entirely! where did "development of creativity" as a concept come from? also who cares if TV is "undesirable" or not? the conclusion is about whether today's generation exercises their imagination less frequently than the Boomers.

D: the correct answer.

E: I mistakenly chose this. but actually, the argument NEVER says that "thinking about what you hear (or see)" is equivalent to "regularly exercising your imagination!" in fact, the entire first half of the stim could be read as a "distractor element" (a trap I fell for). You could say, "radio drama requires its listeners to hop up and down on one foot while singing the national anthem. hence [conclusion]." And then E would come in with, "TV drama DOES NOT require its viewers to hop up and down on one foot while singing the national anthem." Okay, negate that: TV drama DOES require us to hop and down on one foot while singing the national anthem. How is that connected to exercising your imagination? E is pointless because the bridge between thinking about what you hear and using your imagination is never established in the stim.