This is the only question I missed on this section, and I found it very hard to reconcile C even upon review.

The argument as it stands is really bad. It reminds me a bit of an easier question where one of the ACs bait you to strengthen an argument in the ways that it is already bad rather than fix its flaws.

https://classic.7sage.com/lsat_explanations/lsat-79-section-4-question-14/

In Q14 AC C baits you into making the same bad assumption that the researchers are making. Their bad assumption is that a display of emotion is a good indicator of what emotions a person is truly feeling.

In this argument the challenge assumes that a lack of documentation and it being written by enemies are relevant to this question when really they are pretty bad evidence. AC A and B attempt to strengthen this already faulty relationship.

A says yes there is very little documentation

B I think is worse than A but baits you into thinking yes these are enemies

C tries to make what scant evidence there is more relatable and say it is possible he did not commit these acts

AC C I think could be faulted for saying it is not within the scope of the "argument." That AC C is supporting the conclusion through something not related to the argument at all. I think this can be overcome in saying that the argument already speaks to scant documentation and AC C is giving more details about that documentation in that way that makes it more relevant to the conclusion.

Rather than C being a great strengthener it seems the key is to eliminate A and B.

Regardless, I'm not totally sold on my own analysis of this and would love to hear other people's thoughts on how they perceive this question. #help

For whatever reason when an LSAT stimulus talks about the purpose of something I find it really easy to overlook that statement.

Some questions that trade on a similar type of inference reminded me of:

https://classic.7sage.com/lsat_explanations/lsat-76-section-2-question-15/

https://classic.7sage.com/lsat_explanations/lsat-75-section-3-question-13/

-9 on the LG and still a 163..... not bad but probably taking it one more shot in September

Damn, I wish I would've seen @ before I cancelled my Dec score. I know I did better this time around though.

Great advice Accounts!

Glad to hear I'm not the only one having dreams about scores.

I dreamt last night that I got a "164.5" lolol because that's a score you can get.....

I think this is a really hard balance to strike.

I've found that for myself the majority if not all of my actual learning occurs on review. If you're not reviewing tests thoroughly then you're missing opportunities.

For me I quit my job to study full time for a bit and I usually get in 6 or so hours a day 5ish days a week. However, I find there are diminishing returns and the first couple hours of focus are the most productive. If you don' have the luxury of studying a lot I would say keeping the information fresh and trying to do something most days of the week is the way to go.

Probably also depends a lot on how much you're trying to improve. The first few points probably come easier than LSAT points higher up. The average improvement people say is 10 LSAT points or so I hear. Improving more than that is very achievable as many awesome 7sagers have done it, but the common thread it seems is they devoted a lot of time to doing that.

Good to know! I'll happily pay another $30 just in case. Not a huge deal.

I think part of the reason C is so attractive is that it makes the same assumption that the argument makes. The researchers observe emotion and then hypothesize it exists. AC C bates you to make a similar logical leap.

Maybe take at least a few of the recent tests and see where you're at (70+). I think they're quite a bit harder than the older tests, but consider saving some of them as well. If you end up having to retest then you will still have recent PTs that you haven't seen. The unusual logic games on the more recent tests really took me off guard.

But, I definitely agree with @ 's comment above as well. Delaying gives more time to study and applying earlier in a cycle really helps your chances of admission.

Unsure if I'm going to take the September test or not. If my account expires can I renew it at the same level if I buy one of the extensions or does it need to be continuous?

Can someone explain how "willingness to pay being proportional to need" is an assumption and not a stated premise of the economists' argument? #help

I got this down to A and E under timed conditions but the "assumed" in E gave me pause so I went with A. Due to JY's explanation I see why A is wrong, but I'm having a hard time seeing how it (the CA's argument) denies an assumption of the economists' argument. Isn't it (the statement ascribed to be an assumption be AC E) a stated premise of the economists' argument? Can a stated premise be called an assumption?

Possible explanation for how it is an assumption #1

Is "pay being proportional to need" an assumption only because the CA assumes that that is what economists think and they are not being quoted or saying it themselves?

If I say that "I think X" (independent of if I do or don't), and you say "he thinks X" is that an assumption because you assume I'm making a statement that I believe?

Possible explanation for how it is an assumption #2

On BR I think I might see a gap between "paying more and really needing something" and saying that "paying more is proportional to need." But I can't really explicitly describe it...

If need is a binary thing and not a spectrum, then wouldn't that not be an assumption implied by the statement? Or if need is a spectrum and the economists think that need is then wouldn't that be exactly what they are already saying?

I definitely need to give this some space and come back to it....

Kind of random but this is what I thought about Q21 D when I read it. I would argue that intentionality is the part of D that seems really wrong to me.

This article argues that these people indirectly help lizard populations they hunt through land-burning rituals.

If the author is correct and fear is the motivating factor. Fear seems like something that could easily be an unconscious or non-intentional force motivating an action.

"In a 2013 paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, the Stanford anthropologist Rebecca Bliege Bird and colleagues found that the Aboriginal Martu of Western Australia carefully burn patches of land and in doing so increase the populations of the local monitor lizards they hunt. According to the Martu, the practice follows the wills of ancestral beings and the sacred law, ‘The Dreaming’. Burning patches increases plant diversity, which in turn increases animal diversity on which monitor lizards feed."

https://aeon.co/essays/why-god-knows-more-about-misbehaviour-than-anything-else

Just a theory here, but I feel that flaw questions on older LSATs would have one major flaw and then the correct answer choice would be the largest flaw. Where as there are so many flaws with this argument it's hard to begin to describe them all.

A similar but possibly harder question that reminds me of this one is Q13 from S4 of PT 76.

https://classic.7sage.com/lsat_explanations/lsat-76-section-4-question-13/

The argument is just so horrendously bad that it is difficult to even know where to begin.

I chose B, but on BR I'm definitely seeing fault with it.

If B said something like the third view is TOO OFTEN neglected I think this could be supported because it seems like almost a necessary assumption of the argument. If the speaker thought something was often neglected and was concluding more of it should be done, then is seems they are forced to agree that that view is too often neglected.

However, the subject of AC is not even just view 1 it seems to be a subset of view 1 that we have no knowledge about. It is conception of human needs that EXCLUDES the notion of community. Is that all of the views of 1 or most or few? Seeing all of these problems, B is really not a great AC to select.

I think a problem I have with complex stimulus and ACs like this is getting tunnel vision and checking to see if specific parts are supported rather than reading the AC holistically.

Yanny?

Rocked. Under timed conditions I had no chance on this one.

Was thinking about coal plants in real life. 1) They rarely turn all the way off and 2) their ramp speeds up and down are so slow that they are almost always on even when they are losing money. Combined with thinking of the car running at the stop light I totally got caught on this one.

JY's emphasis on understanding the stimulus before moving into the questions is key. Maybe this could have helped me here.

This question reminds me a lot of question 14 in S1 PT 76.

One portion of the AC is really up in the air. Does this activity "interfere"? That seems like a stretch. But, the other portion of the AC is directly what the conclusion is stating "there is harm," and no other AC comes close to having the language of the conclusion so by POE this has to be right.

https://classic.7sage.com/lsat_explanations/lsat-76-section-2-question-14/

Here no other answer choice supports "knowingly aided" except one. So although the part about reasonable suspecting a service to be misused may not be supported no other answer choice really references the conclusion at all.

Probably wrong on this if I'm disagreeing with JY, but I don't think his most cut analysis is the reason why A is correct.

I agree with how JY characterizes the types of cancers and the unwarranted presumption there, but I think A is picking up on a different flaw. A doesn't talk about if cancers themselves are curable or not curable. AC A says that the argument fails to consider there are causes besides pollutants.

P: Pollutants are LINKED to cancer. [Here we know that two things are positively correlated]

P: Most cancers are incurable.

C: Therefore, THE ONLY way to prevent them is halt all industrial pollutants.

It seems that the argument is assuming sole cause from positive correlation.

I was stuck between C and A on this one and realized I was misreading C to say "fails to consider" rather than as it actually does "takes for granted."

I think one of the flaws in this argument is that it FAILS TO CONSIDER the assumption that C states rather it does not take this for granted. It seems to say that there could be other causes for cancer besides pollutants (if there are several different causes, pollutants cannot be the sole cause).

A I think picks up on the positive correlation to assuming sole cause by saying other factors could be producing this thing.

I think JY's flaw is also a flaw the argument commits and could be the correct answer choice on another question, but I don't think that is what AC A is describing.

This is kind of silly mistake on my part, but there is a key difference between this type of question and a parallel reasoning type of question. For this type of question you need to parallel the relationship between the things not in an argument support structure but more in a temporal, causal, quantitative way.

When I approached question 25 of section 1 of PT 75 I was thinking it was this type of question where some principle needs to be abstracted rather than an argument form needs to be paralleled.

For reference:

https://classic.7sage.com/lsat_explanations/lsat-75-section-1-question-25/

A major key that I didn't do that I think would've helped me get this right is have a clearer separation of concepts.

In P's argument you must distinguish between

"legitimate scientific inquiry" (inquiry)

"advancement of scientific knowledge" (knowledge)

For P's argument to seem coherent he must think either inquiry or curiosity to not lead to scientific knowledge. From context (usage of the word legitimate) it appears he thinks inquiry is justified and thus leads to knowledge. This is an unstated assumption.

V then says there is not distinction between inquiry and curiosity, and introduces another concept, discovery. It seems V thinks discovery is equivalent to knowledge.

The difficulty in all of this I found was reducing these phrases to something short when they all of modifiers, while staying true to the arguments.

My condensed rant of convincing myself of B. I took issue with the premise structure of B and the "is necessary" in AC B.

If a speaker says:

P: If Y then X.

C: Y because X.

(Note the different premise structure than what JY identifies. JY's assessment is how I thought of the argument and seems, I would argue, more correct, but the above seems to be what B is actually describing)

Assuming the above argument structure, can you correctly describe the conclusion as saying they conclude that Y is necessary?

Some statements are conditional statements without conditional indicators. Dogs are mammals. The all or every is implied.

However, Y because X seems more of a stretch to say one is necessary especially because of the particular nature of the conclusion. B even says "a certain result".

If I say my specific dog is a mammal does it still hold that I think all dogs are mammals. This is where I convinced myself. It doesn't have to be that I think all dogs are mammals; I just have to think my specific dog is a mammal which is logically implied from my statement.

According to B it seems that the entire last sentence is a conditional statement and the conclusion, which seems like a bit of an awkward description, but the question stem does say "most".....

E doesn't seem so much right, but rather the least wrong. Classic LSAT.

Does anyone else have good explanations for why B is wrong? #help

B I actually found to be a really tricky answer choice here.

B baits you into thinking that it blocks another hypothesis. However, the stimulus does not say much about symptoms of influenza or how they relate to anything else. Because the stimulus does not say much about the symptoms the portion of the AC that tells us about symptoms might as well not be there.

If AC B was changed to say during this period the incidence of the common cold was unchanged and the part about symptoms was redacted this more clearly does not strengthen the argument.

It reminded me a lot of this question. https://classic.7sage.com/lsat_explanations/lsat-75-section-1-question-11/

I think what would have to make B correct is if it said that the incidence of all illness (a superset) or influenza (same set) was unchanged for a broader population then maybe this would work. This is a common strengthening AC because it blocks other explanations such as larger trends from being the possible cause.

Taking the September test shouldn't change much (other than having to study more) as you should get your scores back in time to apply at the front of the cycle. You can always check school specifics on early applying. The Sept test is the last test that can be taken to early apply at UT Austin.

I'd say take June and keep studying until you get your scores back so you've covered ground if you need to take September.

I tried JY's method of doing the questions after one passage and eliminating answers.

I think I did all these sections a little slow, but on this passage in particular I felt like I spent a lot of time re-reading questions. There are 20 lines of questions for this passage and if you read them once after each passage it ends up being a considerable amount of time of re-reading questions you've already kind of read.

If you're killing it on time then that is definitely a more thorough method, but I wasn't able to answer the last 4 questions in this section under timed conditions. Just a thought. I realize a lot of this comes down to personal timing. To be fair this was a particularly bad section of RC for me due to other reasons so that was probably the major reason.