Probably a good thing to keep in mind, both when you're taking the LSAT and hopefully practicing law sometime in the future: emotional appeals aren't necessarily bad.

The law isn't a cold, abstract thing devoid of humanity; appeals to arguably emotional concepts such as justice, fairness and equality have always been invoked in arguments. Thinking that emotional appeals are inherently bad could lead you to a place where you tell somebody like MLK off for making appeals to humanity in opposition to Jim Crow.

I think that A is a trap answer choice for a much more philosophically 'deep' reason than other trap answer choices; in others, you might reverse conditionality or something, but A is testing whether or not your erroneously believe that an emotional appeal is inherently illogical.

I think that a massive way for a person to improve their score on conditional logic is by doing two things:

- drilling the 'conditional indicators drill' flashcards every day

- drilling the 'distinguish valid from invalid forms drill' flashcards every day

I probably would have gotten this question wrong had I not done those two things.

I think this question outlines why it's so damn important to isolate the conclusion. I read A and eliminated it almost immediately because it seemed to have this odd bit of new information about 'progress.' If I had read A and then immediately reread the conclusion in order to double check, I probably would have gotten this right.

Here's another explanation for D that makes use of the logic curriculum (citations from the stimulus are in bold):

1) 'Subjects guessed correctly less than half of the time.'

1A) That means that MOST of the time, the subjects were incorrect.

2) 'If they had simply guessed that the next image would appear at the top, they would have been correct MOST of the time.'

2A) That means that most of the images were on the top.

We can manipulate the statements above into logic.

Consider 1A; the implication of 1A is the following:

3) the entire set of images -m-> /subject guessed correctly

3, as translated from lawgic into English, would be something like this:

When we consider all of the images provided in the experiment, on MOST of them the subject did not guess correctly.

Consider 2A; the implication of 2A is the following:

4) the entire set of images -m-> correct answer was on the top

4, as translated from lawgic into English, would be something like this:

When we consider all of the images provided in the experiment, MOST of the correct answers were on top.

Because we have a common element in the sufficient condition, we can now do the following:

5)

the entire set of images -m-> images were on the top

the entire set of images -m-> /subject guessed correctly

This should be a familiar setup from the core curriculum: 'most' statements that are flowing from a common element entails an overlap. Ergo, from 5:

6) images were on the top (some) /subject guessed correctly

Translated from lawgic into English, we have the following:

6A) In some instance, when the correct answer was on the top, the subject guessed incorrectly, i.e. guessed the bottom. That is answer choice D.

(Don't beat yourself up if you missed this question. The statements above are difficult to do under timed conditions. If you run into a question like this on testday, I would recommend process of elimination)

I would recommend box-breathing immediately prior to beginning the PrepTest, followed by another session during your ten minute break between Sections 2 and 3.

There are many videos on Youtube that can guide you through it.

I think that C and D are totally there to sucker people with a passing knowledge of the Cold War into picking them.

my brain is bleeding how tf did i not see answer choice D

The thing I hate a lot about this question is that it required us to make the assumption that societies with written traditions have more advanced vocabularies than societies with oral traditions.

I don't know if that's a assumption that everybody can arrive at; in fact, it might not even be true.

"Economy of expression" means that people only say what needs to be said; this is also another assumption that we are forced to make.

The LSAT writers need us to make the leap that oral tradition = less words used.

The above is very cute; Homer's The Odyssey was written in culture where writing hadn't been developed. The Odyssey was recited by poets, yet it had almost 162,000 words.

I feel like C is actually a marvelous weakening answer choice.

The argument that the author is making is that we had far, far more minor painters at this time than major painters.

They then introduce a paradox where we only have an equal amount of paintings from both minor painters and major painters.

They explain that this is because minor painters' work was falsely passed off as the work of major painters.

However, C provides an alternative (and far more plausible explanation): it's not that minor painters are having their work passed off, it's that minor paintings are being destroyed. That's a far more reasonable explanation than the author's hypothesis.

I think that if this question had been a weakening type, C would have been a perfect answer choice, because it provides a counter-hypothesis to what the author is saying.

However, this isn't a weakening-type question. We're told the strengthen, and offering an alternative hypothesis doesn't help the original hypothesis. It actually mortally weakens it.