WAIT i think this isn't totally accurate of an analogy because in later questions, it seems like a better way of looking at it is if brownies are the sufficient and water is the necessary, then you can't make water the sufficient since there could be other things that require water.

i'm starting to overthink this so if anyone has additional thoughts please lmk lol...

i find myself getting confused by all the ways we can describe the sufficient/necessity flaw, and so I was really confused by the answer choices in this question even though I thought I anticipated correctly :( so I thought of another way to try and remember the relationship for this type of question (forgive me if someone has already said something similar in a previous lesson and I missed it!): Think of the sufficient like a brownie, and water as the necessary. The water is just one ingredient amongst several that work together to create the big picture (the brownie/sufficient condition). So if you have a brownie, you know for a fact that there is water there, but you CANNOT say that if you have water then that means I must be eating a brownie. Because there are other ingredients that could be important for putting together the brownie.

So for these questions, when I find myself anticipating "oh they just switched the conditions, but the answer choices are confusing me in how they describe it!" then it can be helpful to think "ok switching the conditions means they aren't considering how there could be other things (ingredients) NECESSARY for bringing about the same outcome" i.e. a brownie is NOT necessary for the presence of water

I hope this helps, and please correct me if I'm doing something wrong!

process of elimination!

SAME HERE!! that completely transformed my super confused brain up until this point lol

i got this right but with incorrect diagramming, sigh. but if it's helpful, in diagramming i just looked at which terms were already connected, and saw that knowledge of history, judgment, and moral themes could all form a chain (i just switched the order of history and judgement but got lucky and still came to the same answer), and then clear and unambiguous moral beliefs was tied to moral themes. clear and unambiguous was the outlier that wasn't connected to the full chain so i looked for an answer choice that connected it with knowledge of history or judgement (we already knew it was connected to moral beliefs which is why i didn't pick D.)

this whole section has been confusing me so much but this was the first time i felt i could take a step back and look at the big picture and simplify the question down to "which terms in the premises are connected, and let's see how we can connect the ones that aren't" and then search for an answer choice that identifies the outlier with a term that's already connected in the chain.

sometimes i come across questions that i faintly recall doing on practice tests at the start of my lsat journey, and remember how they felt sooo hard but now i can't believe i'm getting them right!! this is one of them. this is just to say keep up the grind, it's so hard and can feel unrewarding but i promise you'll start to see the growth!!! we got this :)

totally agree!!

you got this! this is really tricky tbh and will just take time and practice!

to answer your question, remember that the negation of "most" is just the range COULD be anywhere between zero and 50% (i think, someone correct me if I'm wrong). So "at least" makes it seem like 50% is the floor, when really it's the ceiling. it can't be any greater than 50% but could be as low at zero. so no need to do any extra thinking of where exactly within the range it falls, it's enough (i think) to just know the opposite falls within the range but doesn't GUARANTEE a minority or a max of 50%. I hope that helps!!

contrapositives are different than negations! in the last couple of lessons, we've been focusing on negations, which are directly contradictory statements that say the claim is actually not true. The contrapositive is logically the same, just said in a different way. the contrapositive is helpful for identifying different ways the lsat might try to convey the same thing in the answer choices. but here, we're focusing on negations which say "actually, that isn't true at all".

So for question 2, the negation of "some" statements are "none" statements, or A --> /B. So "some alphabets are not phonetic" becomes "all alphabets are phonetic" (or "no alphabets are not phonetic). It's still a little confusing for me but that's my takeaway so far!

ok wait after continuing to sit with this question and doing more lessons after this one, i think i answered my own question! if it helps anyone else, i think the answer here is that these are all different techniques to help achieve the same goal: simplifying tricky language on the LSAT. you may get to questions that sound incredibly jumbled and confusing, in which case doing our usual easy If/then translations won't really help anything because the 1 sentence alone might have multiple conditionals!

the exercise in this lesson is helpful in establishing when/where we can weed out the exception vs. the rule which will make things much quicker (if that strategy works for you!) on test day. kicking part of the sentence up to the domain is helpful in highlighting the part of the sentence you're actually being asked to evaluate. otherwise, when everything is all jumbled together it can be hard to see what the test is actually trying to assess. you don't have to apply these techniques every time, in fact you probably shouldn't. but think of all of these strategies as tools in our tool belt that we can refer to wherever applicable.

I think it's the other way around! If you do satisfy the exception, then stop, the only conclusion we can draw is that the rule does NOT apply to you. But, if you do NOT satisfy the exception, then unfortunately the rule does apply to you and you get no special treatment so you have to follow the conditional we diagrammed. the only conclusion we can draw there is that we know the outcome of the rule applies.

So there are two possibilities: if the exception applies then hooray you have no more work to do, do not apply the rule. OR if the exception doesn't apply then the necessary condition follows and that's the conclusion.

I hope this helps!!

#help

what if the statement is "if government's want peace, they should adopt X policy"

does the word "should" not make it a conditional since that is significantly weaker than something like "....they will adopt X policy" or is it the same and do we diagram it as if "should" also means the same thing as an affirmative action to be taken?

Am i correct in that words like "all, every, etc" like we have learned in past conditional lessons, would make the intersecting sets become a conditional relationship? one of the differences with intersecting sets from subset/superset is that in the latter, all members of a group are within an umbrella of the necessary condition, not some of them, or most of them. So once it's only a bit of overlap, then we have to switch our perspective to the quantifier intersecting set language because it's explaining a different relationship in which there is non-guaranteed 100% overlap as there is in the conditional relationship. Is that right?

I'm confused on how this will help with answering questions? This seems like a complicated way of translating, when you could just simplify the sentence and find the same quick translation based on the previous lessons. I may not be fully grasping this particular lesson, but can someone explain why these three specific frameworks are helpful tools for answering questions?

^^^

this was really helpful!

helpful answer review!