PT61.S4.Q4 - In polluted industrial English cities

lmccullm

Hi all,

Sorry for not posting this in the question itself. I have premium so I'm not able to access all the explanations.

I’m not understanding the answer to S4 number 4. The problem reads:

I don’t understand why D is right and E is wrong. I do understand the logic of D, but “eradicate” means to kill off entirely. If the black spot and tar spot returned after the pollution decreased, the two diseases were not actually eradicated. For this reason, I selected E, which while imperfect was the only remaining option that strengthened it.

Would love some assistance if anyone can help me out. Thanks!

Admin note: edited title
https://7sage.com/lsat_explanations/lsat-61-section-4-question-04/

FixedDice

(D) is right because it touches on the fundamental causal relationship (see "Causation and Phenomenon-Hypothesis Questions"). The argument is that air pollution eliminated those diseases; if air pollution decreased (no cause) and those diseases came back (no effect), then the causal relationship is strengthened.

If the black spot and tar spot returned after the pollution decreased, the two diseases were not actually eradicated.

You do not know that. They could have remained in non-urban areas and simply spread back into the cities when air pollution disappeared.

(E) doesn't strengthen; it's just irrelevant. Those two diseases were the only plant diseases to disappear. Big deal. So what? Does that mean that air pollution was inconsequential in regards to the other diseases? Does that mean that air pollution actually eradicated those two diseases?

Sami

@lmccullm said:
Hi all,

Sorry for not posting this in the question itself. I have premium so I'm not able to access all the explanations.

I’m not understanding the answer to S4 number 4. The problem reads:

I don’t understand why D is right and E is wrong. I do understand the logic of D, but “eradicate” means to kill off entirely. If the black spot and tar spot returned after the pollution decreased, the two diseases were not actually eradicated. For this reason, I selected E, which while imperfect was the only remaining option that strengthened it.

Would love some assistance if anyone can help me out. Thanks!

Admin note: edited title
https://7sage.com/lsat_explanations/lsat-61-section-4-question-04/

Hey!

You have a really good point about the word "eradicate". Eradicate would mean its destroyed completely, so its coming back is a bit problematic in that sense. But I think in this sentence they are using the word to mean "put an end to". The conclusion thinks the pollution helped put an end to the two diseases. In other words pollution was the cause that lead to the two diseases disspearing.

Since our task in the stimulus is to strengthen the assumption that correlation between pollution and disappearing of diseases means one caused the other, even if you keep that understanding about the stimulus that you did, E still wouldn't help. There is no way that having those two diseases being the only two diseases helps us make our connection stronger between pollution being the reason the two diseases were eradicated. Answer choice D is the only one that helps support that assumption.

To understand answer choice D lets consider an analogous situation. Lets say we were treating a person who had cancer with an experimental drug X. It seemed that during treatment the cancer got reduced. But we can't be sure if it was the drug or not. It could be that the person was just getting healthy, or there was a placebo effect or something else. But lets say if the person stops taking drug X and the cancer returns, wouldn't you say it indicates more than before that drug X was helping with the cancer reduction?

This answer choice is definitely not perfect and sufficient. I think that can be the hard part about strengthen answer choices.Our task in these question type is to make the argument stronger than before, even if by little. Because answer choice D makes the causation aspect of the conclusion stronger for which we had no support except correlation in premises, it ends up being the correct answer as it helps make our argument stronger than it was before.

I wonder if you were stuck on E because answer choices A,B, and C are really bad and you had eliminated the right answer. So you ended up picking "E" -something you knew was problematic but felt you had to. In such a situation don't feel that you have to pick something you know is problematic. Eliminate any and all answer choices, including E, that you know are problematic and consider three places you could have gone wrong when you attempted this question: 1) you may have read the question stem wrong or did not completely understand certain nuance, 2) you didn't understand something correctly in stimulus, or 3) you didn't completely understand an answer choice.

I feel like in your analysis of the stimulus you were sure you completely understood the stimulus and it was the answer choices that were hiding something from you, this lead you to pick an incorrect answer choice. I would suggest next time in a similar situation to eliminate any and all answer choices that don't work and circle that question for the second round. In your second round, read with an open mind that you may be reading something too strictly and be ready to parse the grammar out and extract the logic/cookie cutter nature of the argument. Even if in your second round you realize that "eradicate" is problematic, you also by extracting the cookie cutter nature of the argument know that the argument is going from correlation between the two to causation. See if you can find an answer choice that would strengthen that aspect of the assumption. Doing a question this way increases your odds of getting a correct answer if you just missed something.

I hope this helped. Let me know