@MateoAgudelo awful assumption

the assumption that adding cops somehow reduces crime is unwarranted as it is statistically untrue. there are hundreds, maybe even thousands of studies at this point. it is not reasonable to think increasing police numbers results in reduced crime. this is as if i said disciplining your kids through violence is an effective means to create productive members of society.

Center on Juvenile & Criminal Justice

National Institute of Justice

Reuters

Plus, @haena describes the logical leap needed to reach E as an answer.

I'll argue that answer E is not only the right answer, but is actually a really good weakener. This may unironically be one of the few "wrong" LSAT questions, imo. There are certain food substances (Red-40) and pesticides banned in the US that aren't banned in other European countries, and vice versa. Why? The answer is 100% because of political, export-related reasons, and not health reasons. What E suggests is that the banned pesticides may be banned for a reason OTHER THAN its health issues.

"In addition to jeopardizing the health of people in these other countries, this practice greatly increases the health risk to U.S. consumers" is not a premise, so I can weaken it. C is a far less effective weakener than E.

Going through older LSATs versus newer (150+) ones is honestly demoralizing because some of the answer choices on these older questions really show the lack of attention and care from the LSAT writers.

@spencerh98 You're completely right. Also, a drug being "effective" doesn't mean it's GOOD. If an ozempic knockoff is more effective than ozempic, it makes room for the possibility that it is too effective. GLP-1 receptor agonist drugs are very dramatic in their results, and I couldn't imagine possibly thinking making it more "effective" would somehow make it good. I definitely would not want my drug to be more or less effective than what I've been told I'm getting from my doctor.

@jarediw11881 Wow, i just did this PT and only got 21 & 24 wrong. I felt the exact same way.

I realized the difference between B and E are simple, but not initially obvious. I haven't really seen many mentions of it:

Basically, whether B is valid or not is irrelevant. Forget about that aspect for now.

Stimulus says: (some: 1-100%) cluster of minor tremors -> (every) major earthquake

Analogy -> Every time before I bomb a certain country, I lie on TV. I lied on TV today, therefore I will bomb the country soon. (FLAW: past does not predict future)

B says: (All: 100%) high snowfall in region -> (every) river overflow

E says: (some: 1-100%) high infection rate detection -> (every) all local outbreaks among humans

The stimulus says that a cluster of minor tremors does not guarantee major earthquakes. It could, we don't know. Same with E.

Perhaps there's only ever been 1 major earthquake in the region's history, and it was preceded by minor tremors. But there's minor tremors every day that don't lead to major earthquakes. Same could be said about E.

However, B says that there's a 100% guarantee high snowfall leads to river overflow. Why? Because unlike the stimulus & E, B is time-locked by the mention of "spring". If we know that there's only 1 possible instance for river overflows to happen per year, then we don't have to worry about other instances of it happening. High snowfall is effectively sufficient, but one could argue the flaw here is that it's not truly sufficient because it's a past event (that's where the argument over validity comes in- basically irrelevant) predicting a future one.

It's also not a sufficiency-necessity flaw bc we don't actually know if minor tremors are sufficient to major earthquakes. To be honest, I think this problem is junk.

the ethicist has never worked a blue collar job in their life

I can guarantee you this will never be a skill tested during litigation

Lol, I thought "answer for their performance" means they'll be dismissed. I know I and many others have been told by our teachers, higher-ups, and parents that we'll have to "answer for our behavior", which often ended up in some kind of penalty. Even our politicians and courtroom judges use it as a threat.

In real life, it is rarely the case that the local economy is separate from the businesses inside of it, especially not new ones. Of course, there are particularly nasty examples that serve as a critique of capitalism & poor city planning. 

However, we need to drop our outside assumptions in order to answer this question, or at least be mindful that we hold these assumptions, many of which are true outside of the scope of the exam. 

A potential real-world example of this is data centers. Building & running data centers has little to no positive impact for the local community's economy, but the economic activity of said data centers is massive and the corporations running them reap the benefits. The local economy's GDP artificially "increases" by forcing taxpayers to subsidize these data centers, but the increase in negligible and inevitably is smaller than the gains the corporations receive.

@colesalton939 Exact same issue here lmao

@cbrianne1570 i agree. this is why im moving on and gonna do a practice problem using sequential

@ZenZigzagMenu this was my exact issue right here, ty!

I just steamrolled through this section and then I spent 10 minutes on this thinking it's a 5-star.