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How to approach "most logically completes" LR questions

allison.gill.sanfordallison.gill.sanford Alum Inactive Sage
in General 1128 karma
Does anyone have a specific strategy for these? They seem to be cropping up more often, and I usually do it by gut instinct, which is fine with easy ones but hasn't worked as well for harder questions. I think this trips me up because I'm not sure what the LSAC wants here. I heard one explanation that you need to take all given premises from the stimulus and choose a conclusion that uses them all in some way... but should that the be goal if using all the given premises would make you construct a bad/illogical argument? I don't know if they want a solid, less flawed argument, or something that looks more like a typical question stem with issues, but that links all the ideas in a flawed support structure.
Help?
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Comments

  • c.janson35c.janson35 Free Trial Inactive Sage Inactive ⭐
    2398 karma
    No, you do not have to use all the premises and you definitely do not want to pick an answer that makes a flawed argument. You are simply looking for an answer that must be true according to the premises. Must be true is the key. There should be no doubt if the answer you are selecting is In fact true according to the information in the stimulus.

    Hope this helps!
  • allison.gill.sanfordallison.gill.sanford Alum Inactive Sage
    1128 karma
    Thanks that is helpful! I will just treat as MBT then.
    The question I'm having issue with is PT 74, sec 4, Q 7. I didn't want to choose A, which turns out to be the right answer, because I thought it completed a terrible argument. Stimulus says for a group of patients awaiting heart treatment, not yet knowing if they will need a surgery is correlated to less pain, while those who definitively know their treatment are in more pain. Stimulus then says "assuming uncertainty is more stressful than knowing what the future holds... reasonable to conclude that" A) Stress sometimes reduces the amount of pain a heart patient experiences.
    How can we conclude that stress is a causal factor in the pain level?
    Here's how I mapped it:
    not knowing <--> less pain
    not knowing (uncertainty) --> more stress

    All I can see is the potential relationship, that some of those heart patients in less pain also have more stress. And even then you have to read the correlation between not knowing and less pain as not knowing causing less pain, which is another assumption...
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