PT79.S4.Q12 - west: of our company's three quality control

kacantolina

Good lord, I find this question frustrating and I cannot for the life of me determine how any single one of these answers could be seen as satisfactory.

This is the question where West says that Haynes is the worst inspector. I honestly couldn't figure out how any answer would suffice, and even seeing the correct answer, I cannot begin to fathom why it might be correct. I think this literally may be the only case where I haven't been able to even begin to understand why the right answer is correct for this question.

The correct answer states that Young responds by denying one of West's presuppositions. But I cannot see how Young does this. Young states that Haynes inspected significantly more than half of the appliances inspected last year. I immediately registered this as countering West's argument by pointing out that given the proportion of appliances Haynes inspected, it does not indicate any failing that such a high proportion of rejected appliances would have been inspected by him. Can anyone give me a breakdown of this?

Where is the "presupposition?" How on earth would Young be countering it?
https://7sage.com/lsat_explanations/lsat-79-section-4-question-12/

BinghamtonDave

Presupposition simple means an assumption that is taken for granted.
For the better part of 30 years the LSAT has been conflating percentages with whole numbers and whole numbers with percentages. This has been a staple of the exam on flaw questions and weaken questions. For this questions, West does precisely that age-old mistake. Any analysis of this question must start before we read Young's reply. Is there anything wrong with West's logic? What does the argument overlook? In other words, if this were a flaw question, how could we describe or point out what is wrong here? I should note here that this is important because if we see a flaw and we know how to describe that flaw and Young doesn't respond by pointing out that flaw, that could be a problem and might give rise to an ad hominem response, a non sequitur response etc. There are questions like the latter.

West says Haynes is the worst. Why? Because there are 3 workers that check for QC and of the products returned half were checked by West. This means that of the products returned, West let half of those sloppy products out the door.

What is wrong with that? Well, imagine a scenario where Haynes, David and Michelle all work QC for the company. Today we sent out 100 widgets. 90 were inspected by Haynes, 5 by David and 5 By Michelle.

Next week comes and we get 2 returns: 1 inspected by Haynes 1 inspected by David. Still 50%
From this scenario, does it follow that Haynes is the worst? No. At the very least, it doesn't. So in order for West to conclude what West concludes, what must be the presupposition? What must be the assumption? That the 50% is somehow indicative of raw numbers which in turn are somehow indicative of "worst." West leaves this door open.

Young replies: but Haynes inspected 90/100. This gets to the core of the assumption of West's argument.

I hope this helps.
-David

P.S. I should add in conclusion that this is a very tough question. One in which the argument sets up a flaw in a conversation and then constructs someone to respond by quite acutely pointing out that flaw. This is a very "inside baseball" approach the test writers took here: Young's answer is the starting point of what we would use to locate a flaw question answer choice. What has helped me immensely in getting a firmer grasp on these questions is the 7Sage package. You should consider getting one. JY's explanation for this question is in depth.

kacantolina

Thank you so much! I think I must have been misunderstanding what part of the argument constituted a presupposition. I could clearly see that West's logic was flawed because it didn't take into account the percentage that Haynes was inspecting, but I couldn't find an answer that matched, "didn't take into account the percentage that Haynes was inspecting" and didn't feel like any of the answers were clear analogs to that. But I now see how making the leap from "50% of returned goods were inspected by Haynes" to "Haynes is the worst" is the presupposition to which the answer refers.

I will definitely look at the 7sage package...it's seeming like it would be extremely helpful!

Giant Panda

When reading the question, you should be immediately pick up as of exactly how Young is trying to attack it-by pointing out an uneven distribution.

When I am reading the question there are 2 assumptions that I in my mind:

1) Maybe the number is undistrubuted between the 3 individual
2) Maybe the factory is manufacturing and introduced a different type of problem, and since it has never been seen before, it is unlikely for any quality inspection to pick it up. And furthermore, it sucks that it all landed in the guy's hand.

And when you read the response, it is actually pointing to the first choice. So there is the answer E.