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 actually isolated B and C when I took this prep test for the first time as well. I'll try to condense what I have from my wrong answer journal:

First of all, the argument commits two flaws: first, correlation =/= causation. Baby stuff.

But it also commits another flaw: the argument only demonstrated that there is a correlation between this gene and a certain type of impulsive behavior.

What type of impulsive behavior? Impulsive behavior similar to adult thrilling-seeking behavior.

If this argument only had the correlation/causation flaw above, it would say something like the following:

"Ergo, this gene causes this particular type of impulsive behavior similar to thrill-seeking behavior."

But this argument takes another leap of craziness; it says the following:

"Ergo, this gene causes thrill-seeking behavior."

So the second flaw is that it equates impulsive behavior similar to adult thrill-seeking behavior with thrill-seeking behavior in general.

I'm outlining all of this because if the answer choice attacks either of the two flaws above, it's a weakening answer choice. B goes after the correlation/causation flaw with flying colors.

C seems to attempt attacking the second flaw, but it doesn't; C reads:

"Children are often described by adults as engaging in thrill-seeking behavior imply because they act impulsively."

Thinking that this answer choice attacks the second flaw forces one on assume the following:

A) we have to assume that it is somehow questionable to designate one as 'thrill-seeking' the basis of 'impulsive behavior.' Is that valid? Is that not valid? We have no clue. It instead leaves it entirely up in the air as to whether or not this is erroneous.

Already this answer choice is on thin ice, but even if we cut this answer choice some slack and give it the most charitable reading (which you should never, EVER do by the way; answer choices work for us, not the other way around), it also requires an additional assumption:

B) the scientist within the argument made this perceived mistake. We have no idea if the scientist even committed this perceived flaw going merely off the basis of something that adults "often" do.

C requires too many assumptions to get off the ground. It does not attack the argument in a strong, direct way that we'd expect for a "Weaken" question type.

"21 Common Argument Flaws" from the Flaw-Descriptive Weakening section has a list.

Cassidy's "The Loophole" also has an excellent list w/ in-depth descriptions and examples of each.

Depends from person to person. Before I take the day's first RC passage, I might review an RC passage I took the day before. Or I might read for about fifteen minutes from a book, or a publication like The Economist.

Yep. I thought it was something like a 'benign tumor.' Googled and saw that a secondary definition was 'kindly', and knew I was wrong immediately. FML.

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.

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

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.

It's an implied misunderstanding that the speaker makes.

(Some) psychologists' original argument (Found between 'Some... motivations'):

Understanding another person -(best way)-> deep empathy

The speaker then says the following ('But... motivations'):

/deep empathy --> /understanding another person

This is the contrapositive of:

Understanding another person --> deep empathy

Notice how the speaker completely dropped the "best way to do that" and substituted it for straight up conditional logic. The speaker is assuming that because the psychologists are arguing about the 'best way' to do something, it is the 'only way' to do something. That's the flaw.

The critical word here is 'relying.' The argument doesn't really rely upon the metaphor of reading.

If we were to have a stimulus that compared BOTH music and painting to the act of reading, and then said that one failed to live up to the standards of reading and another succeeded, then we could probably have good grounds to select D.

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.

The only part you need in order to find the correct answer choice is found in the final sentence at the bottom:

Scrupulously honest politician --> /effective

E reads: scrupulously honest politicians effective

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.

Keep a diary of words that you don't know. Look up the definitions and write them down. Quiz yourself on these definitions every week.

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.

Probably wouldn't have an effect; we have no way of knowing how far-reaching the drug trials were, but it is highly, highly likely that it wouldn't've shifted the amount of asthma-related deaths in one way or the other. The answer choice would probably remain irrelevant to the stimulus overall.

First, try to translate. Here's my attempt at a translation:

"We've got this newspaper. It's paying its workers far less than other newspapers. An executive that is running this newspaper is saying that not paying its workers as much is justified because they get experience."

That's it. 'Don't like the fact that we don't pay our reporters as much? Well, they're getting experience, so that makes up for it.' That's the entirety of the argument.

Since this is a weakening question, we need to come up with a way that the experience gained isn't worth the comparative lack of pay. That's going to be what we attack; we need to find some answer choice that makes experience worthless. Always try to go into the answer choices AFTER you've come up with a flaw in the argument; otherwise this leaves you susceptible to trap answer choices.

Why does B work and the others don't? It attacks the worth of the experience gained in a way that the other choices don't.

Whatever you think about the virtue of unpaid internships, there is an argument to be made that these internships give experience. Why would we want experience? We want experience because we want to eventually use that experience to do later jobs that actually pay us. It's one of the only reasons we do an unpaid internship: it could prepare us for the future by giving us the tools to do future jobs effectively.

B, despite looking like irrelevant bullsh*t, actually attacks the executive's justification in a powerful way: The executive is saying that we're paying them in experience. B responds by saying the following: 'But these employees never go to any other companies! They're stuck in their jobs! This experience isn't preparing them for later jobs; they're just shackled to your company, and they're still not getting paid! This experience is effectively worthless!'

Weakening questions are powerful because they demand that we introduce new information. Even if something looks like crazy nonsense, really try to see if it blows a hole in the argument; it might be attacking the argument in a powerful way.