NA Approach that may help people struggling!

Nicolekh

Hi Everyone-
I have struggled with NA questions a lot and found an approach that for me has been a bit more intuitive and grounded in an understanding of how LR questions are made and would like to share it. I am hoping this helps people like me who have struggle (and apologize if anyone else has already posted this)!

-We know that for Necessary Assumption questions, the premises given do not, by themselves, justify the conclusion reached.

-However we know that the author believes that their premises DO justify the point being made.

-The author, in going from premise to their conclusion, has made assumption that they believe warrants the conclusion, but we know whenever an assumption is made it is dangerous, because it represents a flaw in the argument.

-However, for NA questions, you want to study the relationship between the premises and conclusion carefully and see what the author is assuming to get from his/her premise to the conclusion of their argument.

-Then, with the assumption you have, you go into the answer choices looking for an answer choice that allows the assumption to hold (this also works for bridging NA because the author is assuming for example, that from A-->C we can conclude A--->D, so we would have to say that it is the case that C is somehow indicative of D).

For example, from the June 2007 PT section 3 question 11

Premise: Feathers from 1880s have half as much mercury as living birds from same species
-Mercury is derived from fish eaten by bird

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C: Mercury levels in saltwater fish are higher than they were 100 years ago

This is a cookie cutter NA question in the sense that they give us a phenomenon and something to do with that phenomena, and then conclude that that thing is the only way the phenomena could have occurred. In another sense, that nothing other than fish could have influenced the Mercury levels. This is the authors assumption, and we go in to the AC's looking for something that would affirm (protect) the author's argument

E is correct because it allows our assumption to hold- that other things did not influence mercury levels by telling us that the process used to preserve the birds did not influence drop in mercury level the premise tells us about. (Making it more likely that seabirds are the reason there was less mercury in the older birds)

When you look at every other ac, you can see if has nothing to do with the assumption and so you can get rid of it. This has helped me go faster and understand that the LSAT is all about understanding the gap between the premise and conclusion, and how this helps you go a lot faster!

Hope this helps you all!
Nicole

Katastic

Thank you!
NA are so hard for me and it makes me feel so dense.

marmalade

Thanks for sharing this!
My question is that what if sometimes you cannot see the gap immediately? For example, in PT41-2-24, I cannot see the gap or flaw even after blind review. For these harder questions sometimes the general approach doesn't work for me (perhaps I didn't see the gap), what's your advice? Try negation test?
Thank you!!!