PT81.S2.Q23 - legislation, compromise, no party is satisfied

Junior Allosaurus

I chose E and was very confident about it on both timed run and BR. My reasoning was, the first premise is talking about "legislation," and the conclusion is about a "trade agreement." I thought it was super vague whether a trade agreement should be considered a legislation since we don't even know who are the parties involved - it could well be a trade agreement between a few private companies and it would have nothing to do with legislation. I know I am making a lot of assumptions here, but I just didn't feel safe to assume that a trade agreement = legislation, either. E basically says the principle doesn't apply to the specific case of the trade agreement, but it turned out to be wrong.

I can totally understand why B is correct. But why is E be wrong? Am I just thinking too much? How can I avoid this kind of overthinking in LR? Thanks so much! Any help is appreciated.

Admin Note: https://7sage.com/lsat_explanations/lsat-81-section-2-question-23/

tahurrrrr

A trade agreement and legislation are both official documents that signify a formal agreement, so while I see your point about company trade agreement versus government stuff, the distinction isn't big enough to really consider that they aren't basically equivalent imo.

Now here's my attempt at explaining how to evaluate answer choices such as E because answer choice like this come up a lot. When an AC uses extremely vague language the way that E does, you need to see if you are able to trade the vague language for concrete pieces of the stimulus and have it make sense. If you can't trade in the vague pieces for parts of the stimulus and make the AC make sense, it's wrong.

The vague terms in the AC you would need to be able to swap out are "a particular case" and "a different kind of case." Can you concretely define both with things written in the stimulus? I think you could define "a particular case" as competing interest groups being unhappy with a compromise. But what would be the "different kind of case?" The conclusion and its support are also talking about competing interest groups and them being unhappy with a compromise. So there's no "different kind of case" therefore this answer can't be right.

In my experience, it's 50/50 whether vague answer choices are right or wrong, so don't assume one way or the other. Again you really have to stop and think "Can I swap the vague pieces for parts of the stimulus and make this make perfect sense?"