LSAT 133 – Section 1 – Question 03

LSAT 133 - Section 1 - Question 03

June 2011

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Question
QuickView		 Type Tags Answer
Choices		 Curve Question
Difficulty		 Psg/Game/S
Difficulty		 Explanation
PT133 S1 Q03
+LR
Flaw or descriptive weakening +Flaw
Sampling +Smpl
A
1%
156
B
1%
159
C
97%
163
D
0%
156
E
1%
154
120
124
135
 +Easiest 146.357 +SubsectionMedium

A recent survey quizzed journalism students about the sorts of stories they themselves wished to read. A significant majority said they wanted to see stories dealing with serious governmental and political issues and had little tolerance for the present popularity of stories covering lifestyle trends and celebrity gossip. This indicates that today’s trends in publishing are based on false assumptions about the interests of the public.

Summarize Argument
The argument concludes that trends in publishing are not based on the true interests of the public. This is based on the claim that journalism students are more interested in different stories than the ones that are most commonly published.

Identify and Describe Flaw
This is a cookie-cutter unrepresentative sampling flaw. Journalism students’ tastes in stories are not likely to represent the general public’s interests: they will probably be more interested in serious political and governmental issues, even if the public is truly interested in trends and gossip. So, this survey does not really support the conclusion that publishing is based on false assumptions about public interests.

A
It takes what is more likely to be the effect of a phenomenon to be its cause.
The argument never discusses or relies on the idea of cause and effect relationships.
B
It regards the production of an effect as incontrovertible evidence of an intention to produce that effect.
The argument doesn’t involve any questions of whether an effect was caused intentionally or not.
C
It relies on the opinions of a group unlikely to be representative of the group at issue in the conclusion.
The argument uses the opinions of journalism students to draw a conclusion about the general public’s journalism preferences. This is likely to be an unrepresentative sample.
D
It employs language that unfairly represents those who are likely to reject the argument’s conclusion.
The argument never refers in any way, fairly or unfairly, to those who are likely to reject the argument’s conclusion.
E
It treats a hypothesis as fact even though it is admittedly unsupported.
The argument doesn’t treat an unsupported hypothesis as a fact. In fact, there isn’t any stated hypothesis which the argument admits is unsupported to begin with.

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LSAT PrepTest 133 Explanations

Section 1 - Logical Reasoning

Section 2 - Logical Reasoning

Section 3 - Logical Reasoning

Section 4 - Reading Comprehension

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