LSAT 150 – Section 3 – Question 21

LSAT 150 - Section 3 - Question 21

June 2018

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Question
QuickView		 Type Tags Answer
Choices		 Curve Question
Difficulty		 Psg/Game/S
Difficulty		 Explanation
PT150 S3 Q21
+LR
Evaluate +Eval
Net Effect +NetEff
Link Assumption +LinkA
A
4%
154
B
34%
160
C
29%
161
D
34%
166
E
0%
151
160
169
178
 +Hardest 148.057 +SubsectionMedium

Evaluate

Finance minister tells us that The World Bank runs a list for the Top Countries to Do Business in the World. They look at two things to determine your rankings. LSAT score no just kidding. They look at how easy it is for a hypothetical business to (1) file taxes and (2) comply with regulations. Ease of (1) plus ease of (2) gives you a good rating. If either or both are difficult, then that hurts your rating. The finance minister then tells us that they just made it a lot easier for small-medium sized businesses in their country to file taxes, i.e., to do (1). Okay, so next year their rankings will improve, right? Well maybe.

Here, probably many of you saw the issue with the rankings having two components. The arguments assumes that (2) didn't get any harder. So if we can show that (2) (complying with regulations) either got easier or stayed the same, then that's good for the minister's argument. But if (2) got harder, then it might have offset the gains made in (1) and that would be bad for the argument. So if that's what you had in mind, and you went down into the answer, you should have come up empty handed. No answers said that. (C) doesn't say that. (C) asks if (1) is more difficult than (2). What? We don't care about that! Answer that question either way and it doesn't matter. What we actually care about is if (2)-last-year was more difficult than (2)-this-year. It's the across-time-comparison of (2) to itself that we care about. Not the snapshot-in-time-comparison of (2) to (1).

Anyway, all of that is to hide another gaping hole in the argument. We kind of just assumed that because this person is the finance minister, they'd be talking only about relevant businesses, so we probably didn't even pay attention to when they said (1) was easier for small-medium sized businesses. We probably just assumed that those are the kinds of businesses that the World Bank would take as their hypothetical businesses. But we don't actually know that. What kinds of businesses will the World Bank actually look at when they're assessing the ease of (1) and (2)? We better hope for the Finance Minister's sake that they'll be looking at small-medium sized businesses! That's what (D) gives us.

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LSAT PrepTest 150 Explanations

Section 1 - Reading Comprehension

Section 2 - Logical Reasoning

Section 3 - Logical Reasoning

Section 4 - Reading Comprehension

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