C - I came up with JY's same reasoning.

E - I think that this is wrong on Relevancy and on the grounds that it's too broad.

B is not correct because it's a bit of a jump to say that a "democracy isn't functioning effectively" because of a few groups that can't get their act together.

Also, if D is the correct answer, does it mean that "as wide a membership as possible" is supported by what the passage says "exceeds a certain size"?

I would agree. I also don't think it hurts to say that the "expanding" part of that answer choice makes it even more agreeable with the stimulus.

Imagine that the max score on an evaluation is 100.

Then imagine in the local applicant group, every single person made a score of 90 or more.

Then imagine that everyone in the nonlocal applicant group did horribly and nobody got more than a 20.

According to the stimulus if the school gave out scholarships to the top 10 percent in each group then on one hand you'd have a couple of people who scored 90+ getting scholarships and on the other hand some people who made scores like 15, 16, 19 are also getting scholarships.

The reasoning of the school was that by giving out scholarships this way they would have given it to the highest scorers. But in my example that I just gave doesn't this just seem to just be bizarre that some people who are scoring low are getting scholarships? Any other handful of people from the local applicant group could be better than the outcome that I just illustrated.

So that's why it's D.

I was stuck between A and C for a long time and ultimately chose C correctly. However, I have a different interpretation of A, what it's trying to do, and I'm writing these thoughts so that someone may correct my thinking so that I may learn. A, in my mind, was actually a very candidate answer in relation to the question. If the capacity for aesthetic judgements is an adaptation based on the brain, then it concurs with the notion it is a function from the brain. By being from the brain, it concurs with the notion that it is a function that assists in self preservation. So this in part, reinforces with the first premise.

However, what makes it wrong as opposed to C is the "justification" part of the question stem. The stimulus author says that we must evaluate the capacity for aesthetic judgements based on how it promotes the survival of an individual. If we take answer choice of A to be true, then we still don't move the ball forward on why the characteristic of survival is the most paramount metric for evaluating aesthetic judgements (are there other standards that are at least equally important?). This is what led me to choose C over A. I think that this is a deceptively difficult question.

Can anyone attest to what exactly makes B strengthen? Can it not be the case that meat is less healthy than fish, but it is still some level of healthy?

#help (Added by Admin)

whoever wrote this probably wrote the rolling pin problem

Okay I think that I am able to reason through this without lawgic...

The counterargument in the stimulus is basically saying that some objects are posited to be real only because of theoretical grounds. Meaning that, for some objects, the most explanatorily powerful theory that explains their existence is solely based on theoretical grounds. And since B) says that anything that's based solely on theoretical grounds can't be real, it can't always be true that the something is real because the most powerful theory explains it. It's a direct contradiction.

I got this question wrong, but the more I think about it, the more I like it for what it is. A few comments below me is "mister ho"'s comment that if you read closely, the appeal is not necessarily to history, but to the city government. I think that's correct, and that it's prudent to be wary of balling up words together into something that they're not.

I also want to kind of talk about A), and why even if it was descriptively accurate, then it still wouldn't be where the argument goes wrong. It comes to a point that I've come across in my supplemental readings on argumentation in preparation for the LSAT. Although an appeal to emotion is often the weakest form of support - an argument appealing to emotion isn't necessarily a "flawed" one. For example, in an argument about "why shouldn't we cut funding to homeless shelters in the winter?" a response of "think about people who would freeze" isn't necessarily a flawed argument. So I suppose that a "think about the history" appeal is weak to compel us to think otherwise, but it's not critically flawed.

I admit that I am injecting content external to the LSAT. It would just seem unlikely that LSAT writers would go contrary to this if it were the case that the stimulus was solely about history. I would love to hear anybody else's thoughts about this

I agree with your assumption. Same line of reasoning.

A) Yes I agree, irrelevant.

B ) My reasoning: We don't know how similar the immune systems are for the seals so we can't derive anything good from this.

C) I don't think it's irrelevant, but this doesn't connect the turn the correlation of pollutant levels into them being the cause of the higher death rate.

D) I agree, we don't really care for the kind of pollutants unless we would be trying to weaken it.

E) It is not irrelevant. We have to focus on the argument, and not just the conclusion. One premise does include something relevant: that pollutants are known to impair marine animal immune systems. If higher pollutant levels were evident in that part of the ocean, would we also not expect to see a degradation of other marine animals in the area?

E doesn't prove the conclusion, but it certainly does strengthen it in my view.

I think that one way answering E, without having to know how drug resistance develops, is just to look at the language. If one use of the drug "contributes" to the development of chicken pox, then widespread uses contributes in an additive way. So this bridges the gap between why widespread use is dangerous (because of the additive, dangerous contributions to the development of chickenpox).

I don't know how I feel about this question, and I think that the explanation for this was not thorough enough. I got this right by "gut" but the counter reasoning for A and B can go either way for both candidates.

A can fill in the discrepancy, but you have to make an assumption that Yeung's supporters are a lot more numerous than Panitch's supporters. But as much as you can argue that the numbers will work out for Yueng (given more supporters than Panitch), you can argue that it can swing the other way.

For B, as much as you can argue that the leftover voters will vote for Yueng, you can argue that it will swing the other way.

The assumptions for A is that

-eligible voters will actually vote.

-Yueng's supporters number more than Panitch's

The assumption for B is that

- voters for Mulhern will actually defect to another candidate (and to resolve it the stimulus, this answer choice must imply that the candidate be Yueng). Imply is the key word.

And I think that because B requires less assumptions and it's not a crazy assumption to make given the nature of voting, then it's the right answer.

A would require you to make two assumptions - one of which you are completely injecting information.

I chose D first but then changed to E because I was latching on to the necessity for mitigation of Unalleviated Pain. I think that E is wrong for a reason of scope. Carl speaks about pain protocols, which address pain while in operation. E is talking about pain in a different context, which is post op. Therefore it isn't relevant to weakening Debbie's argument in the context of Carl's argument.