LSAT 151 – Section 2 – Question 09

LSAT 151 - Section 2 - Question 09

September 2018

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Question
QuickView		 Type Tags Answer
Choices		 Curve Question
Difficulty		 Psg/Game/S
Difficulty		 Explanation
PT151 S2 Q09
+LR
Weaken +Weak
Causal Reasoning +CausR
Net Effect +NetEff
A
84%
162
B
1%
152
C
3%
150
D
8%
153
E
4%
155
136
145
153
 +Medium 147.144 +SubsectionMedium

Last year, pharmaceutical manufacturers significantly increased the amount of money they spent promoting new drugs, which they do mainly by sending sales representatives to visit physicians in their offices. However, two years ago there was an average of 640 such visits per representative, whereas last year that figure fell to 501. So the additional promotion must have been counterproductive, making physicians less willing to receive visits by pharmaceutical sales representatives.

Summarize Argument: Phenomenon-Hypothesis
The author hypothesizes that the additional promotion made physicians less willing to receive visits by sales representatives. This is based on the fact that after the additional promotion began, the average number of visits to physicians per representative fell from 640 to 501.

Notable Assumptions
The author assumes there’s no other explanation for the drop in average number of visits per representative.

A
Most pharmaceutical manufacturers increased the size of their sales forces so that their sales representatives could devote more time to each physician.
This presents another potential explanation for the drop in average number of visits per representative. If the number of representatives increased, so that representatives could spend more time on each physician, we’d expect average number of visits per rep to go down.
B
Physicians who receive visits from pharmaceutical sales representatives usually accept free samples of medication from the representatives’ companies.
Whether physicians accept free samples doesn’t affect how we interpret the drop in average number of visits per representative.
C
Most pharmaceutical companies did not increase the amount of money they spend promoting drugs through advertising targeted directly at consumers.
This concerns direct advertising to consumers, which has no clear impact on advertising in the form of sending representatives to physicians.
D
Most physicians who agree to receive a visit from a pharmaceutical sales representative will see that representative more than once during a given year.
This concerns the number of times a physician will see the same representative. This has no clear impact on how we interpret a statistic about how many overall visits an individual representative makes per year.
E
The more visits a physician receives from a pharmaceutical sales representative, the more likely he or she is to prescribe drugs made by that representative’s company.
This suggests that visits to a physician can be effective, if they occur. But the author’s position is that there were fewer visits this year. So, (E) is consistent with the author’s position.

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LSAT PrepTest 151 Explanations

Section 1 - Reading Comprehension

Section 2 - Logical Reasoning

Section 3 - Logical Reasoning

Section 4 - Logical Reasoning

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