PT62.S4.Q11 - A bacterial species will inevitably

meletzyosher

Can any grammar geeks out there please explain how the sentence structure of answer choice B works? How do I know that "that species" is referring to the bacterial species and not to the antibiotic species? I understand that species inherently means something alive and perhaps I am being naive in assuming antibiotics can mean alive as it's name implies death of living things. However, on a purely grammatical level, the subject of the sentence is seemingly the antibiotics so anything coming after a comma that comes after the introduction to the subject should thus be talking about the subject. Am I off about this?

https://7sage.com/lsat_explanations/lsat-62-section-4-question-11/

Admin note: link added

btate87

I see where you're coming from. In my reading of it, though, "species" is a referential phrase referring to "bacterial species" - the relationship is established as well as it needs to be in the first three words of the premise. The specificity is refined in B to species X. Maybe there is some science-based explanation for why "species" should be expected to apply to antibiotics, but they're not relevant to this question. "Species" is never used to refer to antibiotics in the stem or the answer choices, so it would be, at the most extreme, unreasonable to expect that the referential phrase would shift objects, or, at the very least, uncharacteristically vague of the LSAT. Not that the LSAT doesn't like to be vague in some horrible ways, but this sort of shift would be unusual.

AngusMcGillis

Since the stim didn't say antibiotics could be species, I wouldn't assume they were.

Also in real life "antibiotics" generally refer to the drugs, and not the organism they are derived from.