PT71.S1.Q20 - Income from wool sales for family of Australian sheep farmers

legal_name

https://7sage.com/lsat_explanations/lsat-71-section-1-question-20/

In theory, I understand why A, B, D, and E are incorrect answers.

However, C is a challenge for me to accept. Just because there are other products that constitute the full income of a sheep farmer both locally and internationally, it's not like we know how much of their prior business depended on sales in those areas.
For example,
Income:
2% domestically and internationally - muttton
2% domestically and internationally - sheepskins
2% domestically and internationally - "other products"
4% domestic - wool sales
90% internationally - wool sales

I'm no expert in sales, but hypothetically wouldn't an increase in the biggest portion of your income cover and possibly still leave you with profit in the event that the lowest portions of your income decreased? I would love for someone to point out what I'm not seeing.

Thank you for all help!

midna_twili

To answer your question about sales, not necessarily. You could have your biggest area be 30% of sales and have that improve by 50% and you would lose money if the other 70% all went down 80%.

This question asks what would most help and C offers a potential explanation because sharp losses in several other sources of income could offset all of the money gained from the area mentioned in the stimulus.

legal_name

Thank you @midna_twili. I understand, just feels like too big of an assumption to comfortably accept C.

J.Y. Ping

@legal_name If you're asking of each answer choice, "hey can I make you not resolve the apparent paradox?" (POE), then I think you'll run into trouble like this again in the future. Because, as you've demonstrated, you can make (C) not work.

But that's not answering the question stem. The question stem asks for the answer that most helps to resolve. It's at its core a relative question.

So let's try to do it this way. Ask each answer choice "hey if I make you resolve the apparent paradox, then what assumption must I make?" You'll start to see that for each of the wrong answers, you're having to really twist and contort and make like nutso assumptions. Even to the point where you're just rewriting the answer choice completely.

Then you get to (C) and you realize that you have to assume that a meaningful portion of the family's income derives from mutton, sheep skin, other sheep products. You might protest and say that's a stretch. Fine, but it is more of a stretch than the hypothetical you painted above? See, the fact is, we have no evidence to help us decide whether your hypothetical or what I just stated here or somewhere in between is the better approximation of the truth.

I'm not saying that (C) is the absolute best answer choice the LSAT could have come up with. No, I'm sure they could have come up with a better, more obvious answer choice. But I am saying that (C) is relatively the best answer choice.

Do you recall other difficult LR questions where the correct answer also required an assumption? In all those questions, the reasonableness and the size of the assumption required for the correct answer choice is always unambiguously more reasonable and smaller than any of the assumptions required by the incorrect answer choice.

So that's a pattern (mostly for curve breaker questions).

Hope that helps!

legal_name

@"J.Y. Ping" Really appreciate you taking the time to explain that. Shifted my thinking entirely. I think I'll be trying this out on the harder questions - going at it by asking what assumptions I have to create to make the answer choice work (assuming I hopefully have the time) and seeing which assumption is the weakest. There's something more liberating about knowing it's not flawless. Many thanks.