PTF97.S3.Q16 - Zebra mussels,a nuisance when they clog

jmarmaduke96

Hello everyone,

I found this to be an incredibly difficult question. I did get the question right, but I did not feel good at all about my answer choice timed or in blind review. I eliminated the other answer choices because they just seemed outlandish, but I really looked hard at the stimulus and can find precious little textual support for E. Why would it not be possible for the mussels to absorb some of the hazardous waste, but not necessarily become hazardous waste themselves? To me it seemed like that really was making an assumption. I can agree by using my real world knowledge that E would make sense, but in the world of the LSAT where tiny assumptions can separate correct/incorrect answer choices, I really felt that E was just asking me to go much farther than I was comfortable with.

Because of my doubts, I came incredibly close to changing my answer to D in blind review, and even now looking back I can still feel the doubts lingering. Is there something that is just going way over my head here? Does someone else see something in the text that clearly and demonstrably makes E the better answer choice than D?

Thanks so much!

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bobalicious

This is a strange question and definitely feels like an older LSAT! I'll say upfront that I cannot satisfactorily address your question. I think it's just weird that the LSAT thinks we should know what counts as "hazardous waste." But anyway, here are my two cents.

I think the key inference is this: when the stimulus says that the mussels improve water quality by removing hazardous wastes, we can infer that either the wastes (1) stay in the mussels (trap), or (2) the mussels transform them to something harmless (neutralize). But the mussels cannot simply discharge the waste unchanged back into the water. If they did, they would not have improved water quality.

In (E), option (2) is explicitly ruled it out so we're left with just option (1), the hazardous wastes stay inside the mussels.

Now, your question:

@jmarmaduke96 said:
Why would it not be possible for the mussels to absorb some of the hazardous waste, but not necessarily become hazardous waste themselves?

I think this is a part-to-whole inference issue. Sometimes part-to-whole inferences are fine, sometimes not.

You can think of an all-star NBA team where each player is great, among the best, but the team is not so great because the players don't normally play together and so just suck at playing as a team. Other examples include emergent phenomenon, like how each individual ant is rather dim, but a colony of ants exhibit intelligence.

But then you have situations where part-to-whole inferences are okay to make. For example, if the each and every piece of a shack is made out of wood, even the nails, then it's fine to say that this is a wooden shack. In fact, I think even if the nails were metal, it's still fine to say that this is a wooden shack.

So we take the claim that since the mussels (whole) absorbed hazardous waste (part), and they're not neutralizing it, does it mean that the mussels must be regarded as hazardous waste? I don't know. It's not a must be true claim, but then we're not doing an MBT question. It's an MSS question, so I think it is okay to say that sure, we'll make the loose inference. It's like in RC, you have to make these kinds of loose, MSS-style inferences.

jmarmaduke96

Thank you so much, that explanation does help. I was wondering if part of the issue was simply that it was a really old LSAT question, but I didn't want to give my doubts a pass for that reason alone. I hadn't thought of looking at the assumption as a part-to-whole fallacy/inference, but having that foundation and coming back to the question does help to clarify my own thought process as well as where the LSAT wanted me to go with the stimulus!

HopefullyHLS

Thanks, the explanation definitely helps. I also got this question wrong by choosing D, but none of the AC seemed really attractive to me.

I think the way how LSAC wants the test takers to be fooled here is to stick to the relation between water quality and algae removal (at least this is what I did). My thought process leading to D was that, since the mussels improve the water quality of the discharge stream of chemical plants, they must remove at least some algae from there. So how did the algae come to the discharge stream? One possible explanation would be that the plant personnel somehow removed them from the intake pipe they were blocking and threw them to the discharge stream.

The hazardous waste part is so tiny that I did not think so much about it. But taking a closer look at E we see that it actually makes sense, almost a trivial definition of "removing hazardous waste" (although E does not have to be true for ANY hazardous waste, since the mussels remove only SOME hazardous waste, it is "most" strongly supported compared to all other AC). It's indeed sooo subtle...

Definitely one of the toughest LSAT questions and probably the toughest MSS question I've seen so far!