LSAT 154 – Section 4 – Question 24

LSAT 154 - Section 4 - Question 24

September 2017

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Question
QuickView		 Type Tags Answer
Choices		 Curve Question
Difficulty		 Psg/Game/S
Difficulty		 Explanation
PT154 S4 Q24
+LR
Weaken +Weak
Causal Reasoning +CausR
A
31%
160
B
42%
166
C
6%
159
D
7%
161
E
14%
164
153
168
180
 +Hardest 147.301 +SubsectionMedium

People who have experienced a traumatic event but who did not subsequently develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) tend to produce higher levels of the hormone cortisol when exposed to stress than do people who have not experienced traumatic events. This suggests that experiencing a traumatic event can affect how much cortisol one produces in response to stress.

Summarize Argument: Phenomenon-Hypothesis
The author hypothesizes that experiencing a traumatic event can affect how much cortisol one produces in response to stress. This is based on the fact that people who have experienced a traumatic event but don’t develop PTSD tend to produce higher levels of cortisol in times of stress than do people who haven’t experienced traumatic events.

Notable Assumptions
The author assumes that people who have experienced traumatic events without developing PTSD are representative of people who have experienced traumatic events generally (i.e. including those who did develop PTSD) with respect to the amount of cortisol produced in times of stress. The author also assumes that there isn’t another explanation for the correlation observed between cortisol amounts produced and experiencing a traumatic event without PTSD.

A
Medical conditions sometimes affect how much cortisol people who have not experienced a traumatic event produce in response to stress.
“Sometimes” could just be a single occasion. We don’t have any reason to think these conditions occur often enough to explain the lower average cortisol production of the group of people who haven’t experienced traumatic events.
B
Producing more cortisol than average in response to stress helps prevent a person from developing PTSD as a result of experiencing a traumatic event.
This raises the potential of reverse causation. Maybe people who start off producing more cortisol are more likely to avoid PTSD after trauma. This might be explain why the trauma + no PTSD group has higher cortisol production than the group that didn’t experience trauma.
C
People experiencing a traumatic event produce more cortisol than they would under less severe instances of stress.
If anything, this might support the alleged connection between traumatic events and producing more cortisol in times of stress.
D
Many effective treatments for PTSD are designed to reduce how much cortisol those with PTSD produce when exposed to stress.
The comparison in the stimulus involves people who don’t have PTSD. So they wouldn’t be taking the medications described in (D).
E
Experiencing a traumatic event can damage the gland that produces cortisol, resulting in that gland producing more cortisol.
This strengthens the argument by providing a causal mechanism for how experiencing trauma might lead to more cortisol production in times of stress.

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LSAT PrepTest 154 Explanations

Section 1 - Logical Reasoning

Section 2 - Logical Reasoning

Section 3 - Reading Comprehension

Section 4 - Logical Reasoning

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