I also thought E was attractive, but ultimately with PSA we're always trying to justify the conclusion. The subject of the conclusion here is [these newly enacted laws], and E provides us no bearing on what we should do with these new laws (i.e. repeal or leave it?) even if E's prescription is satisfied.

Yes, you are correct! "Reduces" indicates causality, and so do words like increase, decrease, and induce.

To start off, you might want to be more sensitive to words indicating conditionality such as always, only, when, requires...etc. Then, you might want to try mapping things out to make sure you're understanding the fundamentals. Doing these questions in your head will come after mastery of writing everything down and solving the conditional puzzles super quickly.

Hey @alan-91620! This is slightly unrelated but is there any way I can view the section difficulty without scoring the entire test and saving my score? I've been doing individual sections and haven't been saving my results, but when I click the "analytics" tab after I get the results, it just takes me back to old tests I've done. Thanks so much!

I'm still having a tough time eliminating (A) in #13. JY says that "curiosity" is too weak... but doesn't the author need to be curious about the artist at the very least, before "clarifying the motivations" behind the artist's work? Any insight would be greatly appreciated!

I think another factor that adds difficulty to this question is that the traditional RRE "twist" hits us in the very first sentence. Usually, we see this twist that we need to account for at the very end of a string of facts/description. E stuck out to me under time, but during BR, I simply rearranged the first sentence to the end of the results, and E made complete sense. I could now clearly see what I was trying to explain: "Given that dinosaurs could not have gone extinct via dying of coldness from asteroid debris (results), how come the researchers still believe the asteroid killed the dinosaurs (belief)?"

To those who finished the real LG section: what answers did you fill in? I only had time to do the first question, then i think I guessed Ds for the remaining 4 qs

I saw this as a phenomenon/explanation issue. The wording of the final sentence implies that it MUST be because of Activite's effectiveness that the company is offering the month-long supply. We can weaken this argument by proposing an alternative explanation/cause. (D) gives us this alt cause: there is a for-profit goal in this whole ordeal (unsurprisingly).

One issue I did have with (D) was that I thought Activite could still be losing money overall, since (D) states that the handling fee covered just shipping and packing. But what if giving away that one-month supply costed more than the profit you made from handling fees? I thought D lacked an answer to this consideration, but relative to the other ACs, D was the best bet.

I mapped out (E) such that:

In a WFDem (/violate basic rights --> bill promptly passed)

But given the info in the stimulus, we know that the bill will not violate human rights, and we also know the bill "will not be passed for many years, if at all." This means that the bill will not be promptly passed; hence, our necessary condition is denied. Since our condition/rule is disproved, then there is no way we can be in the world of a WFD. Rather, we must be in the binary opposite world: /WFD.

This question reminds me of PT72 S3 Q19 (though the above question is definitely harder, PT72's question is good practice for seeing when rules trigger).

i was having the same issue with Chrome - all the docs would stop loading around page 40, so I just printed from 1-40 and had no loading issues afterwards!

How I thought about this argument during BR was along the lines of quantity does not equal to quality. That is, just because the quantity of wildlife increases, can we validly conclude that wildlife has not been adversely affected? What if an invasive species came in, outcompeted indigenous species, and proliferated, all the while without being a strain on the environment? I didn't think about this during the timed test, but during BR when I re-read (A), the author's sole reliance on "quantity" became questionable. And if A were true -- that EACH species that was there before the development took place -- then we have strong reason to believe that the original composition of wildlife was not adversely affected since their numbers were not reduced.

I was between B and C during my PT, and ultimately chose B.

B strengthens the causal claim in the conclusion because it reinforces the cause with the effect. Conversely, C doesn't match our circumstances in the argument: C states that "On average, in areas of the Rockies where winters are relatively mild," ... this leaves open the possibility that this particular section of the Rockies might just always be milder and doesn't flux in temperatures-- which is what we need to reinforce the conclusion: a mountainous region where winters have become milder, and more melt has led to greater spring flooding and less storable water.

The difference between B and C is super subtle, and it forced me to hone in on the difference between areas that are already averagely mild from areas that have become averagely mild, which is what would match the focus of the conclusion and help strengthen it.

I chose B under timed pressure but changed it to E during BR. After reading the argument, I knew that to weaken the argument was to call into question the relevance of the analogy (this was essentially the only premise here, so the analogy was likely the culprit to weaken).

I chose B thinking that it showed unfavorable consequences of privatizing the telecom industry. However, what I failed to realize was that describing the analogy does NOT call into question the analogy. Calling into question the analogy rather requires differentiating between the two variables, and why the supposed analog cannot be applied to the given situation.

With this in mind in BR, E stuck out to me. E explicitly tells us a difference between the two implementations, and also describes competition, which is the main effect the politician relies on to advance his analogy (telecom privatizes leads to increased competition, which finally leads to better customer experience).

I tackled this argument a bit differently. I recognized that the argument was committing a suff/necc mixup. The conclusion, that it is possible for the reporters to scoop info, is thus unsupported. I looked for a negation of the conclusion, which was an AC that would support that the reporters could NOT possibly scoop. E implies this exactly: if everyone knows the same things, how can you scoop out more info?

(A) was still attractive to me. What helped me was reading it slowly and realizing that just because the reporter does not tell everything to any of the reporters, this does not mean that the reporter didn't give some reporters more info than others. Since this possibility remains possible, scooping remains possible. And if scooping remains possible, we aren't doing a good job at challenging the conclusion (since that's precisely what it states). Thus, A can be eliminated.

I agree with @Kombucha here. @TheoryandPractice, I completely experienced the same line of reasoning as you described above. I even wrote in BR the word "good" before evidence in (B). I believe if this AC had said "denies Yolanda's conclusion without providing GOOD/SUFFICIENT evidence against it, without a doubt this AC would be correct. Similarly to you, I attacked the ACs on the lookout for something that described Arjun's weak evidence.

I completely missed out on the jump from "could" to something definitive here, and that really got me.

Could someone speak more on why this isn't a PSA or SA question? I had these two in mind which probably didn't help me with the ACs since I eliminated all of them in the first run through

Upon reading the argument I was almost certain the flaw was circular reasoning; I thought the premise and conclusion were saying the same thing about the tendency of age to influence the likelihood of providing financial details. I totally missed the subtle causality implied in the conclusion.

The lesson I'm taking here is, as JY said, so long as you spot a correlation in the premises, anticipate that a causal conclusion will be drawn from it -- and that this conclusion is invalid.

referential phrasing was key here!

awesome way of understanding this - thanks!

the part that described how the experiment was "devised to test...." triggered red flags for me. Whenever talking dealing with experiments, you always want to make sure it's a good one; in other words, that it's actually capable of testing whatever phenomenon you've intended.

Also with flaw questions, put the contending AC as a response to the argument in the stimulus, and see if the argument is weakened by the new thing you just said. If it is, you probably have a winner! But, as JY points out often, anticipating the flaw is always the best method of attack on these questions.

Hi @nessak130467 ! My name is Cecilia and I am so very interested in joining your study group! I took the Sep 2016 LSAT and will be taking it again this September. Sundays at 12pm EST are always open for me, and I will be sure to have the section done with priority questions ready for discussion! If there's any chance I could join you guys, I'd appreciate it so very much. Thank you!

Hi @zhouci829 ! Is there any way I could join this study group? I took the LSAT back in Sep 2016 and I'm taking it again this September! I'm almost done with CC and I'll be sure to contribute to the discussion!! :) I would appreciate it so very much if I could study with you guys!