Highlighting a lot is helpful in the beginning, especially when you are building up your fundamentals in RC. I used different colors for a while too, and it helped me learn to create visual maps of the passage.
While you're in the earlier stages you can use your highlighting strategy more as a developmental tool to help you build your skills. As you progress and the test date approaches, you can switch your highlighting strategy to something more tailored to game day -- pare back the amount you highlight if you think it's not worth the time it's taking. I stopped using different colors after a while but I know there are 170+ scorers who highlight intensively using multiple colors and those who barely or don't highlight at all. It's a highly personal choice and I think RC opens itself up to a lot of individual styles.
For LR, 1h (2x) on br is and 1hr on review is fine. Everyone’s different but 1h is close to the max I would spend on BR though. Final Review I’ve spent more than 1h.
For LG, depending on where you are in the curriculum it might not be worth spending that much time BRing. Give yourself some time to work through your process without time constraints but it’s okay to throw in the towel if it feels like you’re brute forcing it. There’s likely something you’re missing in the setup and inferences anyway and if you’re spending way too much time solving it you’re probably just reinforcing a bad technique.
RC BR is the most straight forward. Shouldn’t take as much time as the other two.
Your times will go down across the board as you get better and you get more questions right. I wouldn’t be so concerned about how much time it takes… the goal is to learn, not do as many PTs as you can. The learning process is the important part and the PT is the means to identify what you need to learn.
Thanks guys! I took a break from Lr for the past week to focus on Lg but will check these out.
I don’t think there’s a consensus on how best to tackle the curriculum, even among tutors.
Chronological is a safe bet. LR is good to start (it takes a while for some of the concepts to marinate) and RC best done after finishing LR.
You’ll also need the basic conditional logic lessons in LR to be able to do LG as the curriculum builds on it.
The only change you might consider is that once you’ve finished conditional logic lessons in LR you could consider jumping ahead and weaving in some LG lessons to mix it up a bit. This helps you from burning out on Lr and also gives you more time to absorb LG… especially given your tight timeline. Both Lg and Lr benefit from spaced repetition and some time away.
I would have intuitively read it the same way as JY, because in my subjective understanding the term “as many” is inherently vague and does not imply “exactly”.
But it’s a close call and your reading would more closely reflect the dictionary definition of as many.
That being said, the LSAT is written by phds in linguistics and philosophy… the correct answer choice would never hinge on the meaning of a phrase with such an ambitious idiomatic usage. That’s not what they are testing. Even if you read it the way you did, you would end up with the same answer choice.
Anyone have any tricky LR problems involving conditional logic that they've encountered and could share? Either individual problems or a list, if you by some incredible stroke of good fortune, you should have one, would be great.
Also, if anyone is interested in syncing up to work on some tougher conditional logic problems please reach out.
Which question is that? Would be easier to say for certain if we could see the answer choices, but i'll take a guess.
It sounds like the stimulus consists of individual premises. (X, Y,, Z)
The answer choices are individual conclusions. (A, B, C, D, E)
You can construct an argument by combining each individual premise with each individual conclusion. Ie. X -> A
Y -> E
(note I am using the arrows in a the sense of whatever form the reasoning of the argument takes place, not conditional logic necessarily)
The correct answer is the answer choice which combines most poorly with X, Y, Z to produce a strong argument. Ie the weakest argument that results.
depending on his own experience is exactly what the answer choice says. there is no reference in the answer choice to other people who do not agree.
No, answer choice B still wouldn't work. It might even work less than with the original language.
It doesn't address the gap in the argument, which is the assumption that you have to make for the conclusion to be valid. That assumption is that if something improves safety, it should be made illegal. This doesn't have to be true... you could make a case for why cyclists should not be legally forced to wear helmets for instance.
With the language you suggested, answer B still doesn't fill in this gap. Just because making something illegal is the only way to improve safety, doesn't mean that it is the right choice.
I can't speak to JY's explanation. But I can tell you that answer choice A being correct does not rely on the assumption that any of the books from the last 150 years are significant.
It's just a conditional statement that tells you what happens if a book is historically significant and was published in the last 150 years.
The statement itself does not presuppose that it will be triggered. Since its a MBT question, it just has to be true IF its triggered, for which we can find support in the stimulus.
I (mis)read the stimulus the same way you did, so I had the same confusion. However, I was able to eliminate A because of the phrase "in order to save money", which implies some people ARE saving money.
With the benefit of hindsight, I think while the reading that you and I both took, that everything is being marked up, is an assumption we are making that isn't explicitly stated. We don't have to know that only non coupon items are only being marked up... we only have to know that it is possible, but that only certain items being discounted is also possible, and therefore we can't infer anything either way. That's why A is wrong.
Words like "is" are descriptive, while words like "ought" and "should" are prescriptive ie a subjective opinion on what to do.
Both of your examples have the prescriptive words in it... So your line of reasoning doesn't match the answer choice. The answer choice in turn, also does not match the stimulus.
6 months late, but I don't think technologies is the phrase that is being reinterpreted. what you describe isn't reinterpreting the phrase "new diagnostic technologies", but the implications of the phrase. In my opinion, reinterpreting a phrase is more like coming up with a new definition for something than coming up with new inferences.
Definitely do not do every practice drill. JY has explicitly said not to do this in the podcasts and that the practice drills were not intended to be used in this manner.
It's a balance between reinforcing the material until you have some basic comfort with it and getting through the curriculum at a reasonable pace based on your test date.
When and how many PTs you should do is also very subjective. Depends on how you learn and who you ask.
If you haven't finished the core curriculum though, it's unlikely you should be spending much, if any, time doing PTs. You're just wasting material before you have the fundamental base to solve it. Full length PTs is for building endurance and test taking strategy. That comes after the foundation has been built.
This is a fun quirky one.
Biologist: Forest continues to disappear at present pace --> koala approaches extinction.
Politician: Stop deforestation --> save koala
I suspect the tricky bit here is the translation of the politician's statement into conditional logic. Especially if you are using the core curriculum techniques to mechanically translate "All that is needed to save the koala is to stop deforestation", it is tempting to reverse the sufficient and necessary terms.
The sufficient condition is actually stop deforestation because of the referential phrase "all that" is referring to stop deforestation.
I think the remainder of the question should be clear now,.
Answer choice B gives you:
Deforestation stopped --> koala extinct
This isn't inconsistent with the biologist's statement because continuing disappearance of the forest is a sufficient, not a necessary condition. Something else can cause koala extinction even if deforestation is stopped.
B is not consistent with the politicians statement because the same sufficient condition gives you a different outcome.
I occasionally will use it to take quick notes, but eventually I transfer everything to an excel or google sheet. it's much easier to analyze patterns and review past journal entries that way.
The point on over inclusiveness is a good one. I'm glad you guys included it in the CC as it's something that every student inevitably figures out when they blindly apply the rule without understanding the exceptions where the rule doesn't work. Ask me how I know haha...
I'd love to see a lesson that goes over some exceptions, and shows how words that are almost always indicate a premise or a conclusion can sometimes play a different role based on sentence construction.
#help
if there is a statement that says X is true because of Y, but there are no assumptions... does that mean the statement is not an argument?
See first sentence of
PT 31 S3 LR Q26:
"The media now devote more coverage to crime than"
It's totally normal. Don't worry about it. You will get faster as your study more but how you study affects how quickly you improve with speed.
The key to getting faster is including both timed and untimed work. Timed work helps with building focus & endurance, skipping strategy, and being able to execute your process. Untimed work is where you build the fundamentals and hone your process. It's actually very hard to build fundamentals under timed conditions... so when you're starting out the mix should be tilted more towards untimed work and increasing the percentage of timed as you get better and the test date approaches.
If you go down the path of focusing heavily on one section, just don't make the make mistake I did of not doing enough maintenance work on the other two sections. I like the prior poster's suggestion of carving out targets for spending time on the sections you are not focused on. Early on in my studying, I went through a one month cycle of focusing exclusively on LR and my LG suffered a lot. Then I did the reverse and LR suffered a lot. It took more time to regain it than if I had just done some regular practice.