In a bit of a similar boat. First-gen, studied for 3 months last year, took the LSAT in August, decided to retake the LSAT in the hopes of squeezing out some extra scholarship money, and am now back in the throes of studying for June (and August if I need it!). I took an extra gap year to do so. What made me feel secure in my decision was knowing that law school isn’t going anywhere. When you’re ready to apply with the score you want, it’ll be there. And there is a limit, of course, but the worst case scenario is that you retake and get an even better score the second time around. No shame in that.

In terms of concrete advice, take a week off and then sit a PT and see how you do — your brutal study regime would turn anyone’s brain into goo. And take a breath — you deserve it!

Normally love the explanations, but I think the formal logic overcomplicates this one.

This question is only hard because the conclusion is so buried in the stimulus: that we can’t determine whether there are aliens outside our solar system. We can’t do this by sending a spacecraft (sentence 2 before the comma). But we can do so (this is the “unless”) if there are aliens as intelligent as us who can communicate with us (putting together what comes after the “unless” and what comes after the comma in sentence 2).

(D) puts the two pieces together in a binary — there’s no third way to detect them if they can’t communicate with us and we can’t send a ship. If we can’t do either, and those are the only two ways to detect them, we can't know if they exist.