PT78.S1.Q15 - the production of leather and fur

just.flyy

I just wanted a little clarification on the correct answer. I previously chose A as my answer choice, however the correct answer is E. The reason why I didn't choose E is because E refers to "cultural trends". Would cultural trends apply to fashion trends that the stimulus was referring to? I was a bit skeptical about this and therefore got it wrong Please explain! Thank you
https://7sage.com/lsat_explanations/lsat-78-section-1-question-15/

sagarpatel

Well for me at least, "more" is a relative term. We are drawing a comparison of price drawing more dependency from fashion or production materials. But do we actually know fashion draws "more" of an influence? Also, "any manufactured good" reaches way beyond the scope of argument. I hope this helps to clarify why E is the more viable choice.

BinghamtonDave

I think what the lsat did here has several layers of trickiness to it. I will try to outline the way I see those layers and this problem below.
The stimulus itself isn't that convoluted or complex. It isn't something that requires us to mentally keep track of many different parts. The first sentence tells us 2 things: that the production of L&F in the domain of clothing requires an intensity of labor and that these material have "tended to be" on the expensive side. To get our minds onto something tangible that we can extract from sentence 1, lets consider mink as labor intensive and lets call mink $100. The first half of the second sentence introduces the idea of fashion as something that in some way has the ability to change mink's $100. What we know from the first half of the second sentence is that because of trends in fashion, the price of mink has dropped, again for purposes of getting our minds to envision something tangible: lets say that as fashion moved away from mink, the price of mink dropped to $95. How did I choose $95? By strictly adhering to what the sentence says: A drop in the price. I don't want to assume that the price drop is major, so I just assign it a 5% drop. I could have assigned it a penny drop, it would still be a drop that is indicated in the stimulus. Notice that in the description of the drop in the stimulus there is no modifier, there is nothing that says "substantial" to modify the drop or anything like that.

At the same time that this drop in mink is happening, the price of a piece of cotton (which was $2 per piece) is now $2.25 per piece and we only know two things about that piece of cotton: it requires less labor and is more fashionable.

A good prephrase in accordance to the task the question stem sets up for us at this juncture would be something like: prices of materials seem to be influenced to some degree by fashion. I think this is good because it is weak and weak statements are often easier to prove.

(A) Tells us that fashionability is a greater influence on the price of "any manufactured good" than the materials it is made from. The first thing wrong with this is that it is too wide ranging: "any manufactured good" and the second thing is that there is nothing in our stimulus or the example we have created above to indicate that this is true. What is tricky about it is that at first glance it looks like something masquerading as our prephrase. But like many wrong answers it take our prephrase and takes it into the wrong direction. We can say soundly that there is no support for the comparative statement that (A) makes in our stimulus.

(E) on the other hand is a weak answer choice that is provable. It isn't perfect or how I would have phrased it myself, but it works.