LSAT 155 – Section 1 – Question 01

LSAT 155 - Section 1 - Question 01

November 2019

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Question
QuickView		 Type Tags Answer
Choices		 Curve Question
Difficulty		 Psg/Game/S
Difficulty		 Explanation
PT155 S1 Q01
+LR
+Exp
Weaken +Weak
Causal Reasoning +CausR
Net Effect +NetEff
A
6%
150
B
90%
161
C
3%
148
D
0%
E
2%
151
128
137
146
 +Easier 147.037 +SubsectionMedium

Advertisement: Omnicide kills more species of insects than any other insecticide. So Omnicide is the best insecticide for home gardeners, especially gardeners who cannot determine which insects are destroying their plants.

Summarize Argument

The ad concludes that Omnicide is the single best insecticide for home gardeners, both in general and especially for those who can’t tell which insects are destroying their plants. Why is Omnicide the best? Because it kills the widest range of insects.

Notable Assumptions

The ad assumes that the more species of insects you kill, the better your insecticide is for home gardeners.

A
Some of Omnicide’s competitors kill almost as many species of insects as Omnicide does.

“Almost as many” means “not quite as many.” This simply reinforces the ad’s premise: Omnicide kills the most species of insects.

B
Many insect species are beneficial to garden plants, and Omnicide kills most of these beneficial species.

This undermines the ad’s key assumption. Killing more species than other insecticides do could actually make Omnicide a worse option for home gardeners—especially for those who don’t know which species to attack—because using it indiscriminately will kill beneficial insects.

C
Merely protecting plants from attack by insect pests does not guarantee that the plants will be healthy.

The ad never suggests that using Omnicide will guarantee healthy plants—it just argues that Omnicide is the best option available.

D
Omnicide is more profitable for the manufacturer than most other insecticides made by the same company.

Irrelevant. How profitable Omnicide is for the manufacturer has no bearing on whether it’s the best insecticide for home gardeners.

E
Omnicide does not kill weeds or mammalian pests such as gophers, moles, and groundhogs.

The ad is purely focused on the best insecticide—that is, the best killer of insects. How it performs against plant or mammal pests is irrelevant. We also don’t know whether other insecticides perform any better against such pests.

This is a Weaken question.

The stimulus is an advertisement that states Omnicide kills more species of insects than any other insecticide. From that premise, the advertisement concludes that Omnicide is the best insecticide for home gardeners, especially the ones who can't tell which insects are harming their plants.

But just because an insecticide kills the widest variety of insects doesn't mean that that's the best insecticide. A gardener who wants to protect her plants only wants to kill the harmful insects. This means the assumption in the advertisement's argument is that Omnicide kills only the harmful insects. Now, if that assumption is true, then the argument is pretty great. Omnicide is killing the widest variety of harmful insects. A gardener who doesn't know which insect is harming her plant should get Omnicide because it casts a wide net and increases the chances of killing the mystery pest.

But if that assumption were false, then this argument is severely weakened. Correct Answer Choice (B) cuts against that assumption. It says many insect species are beneficial to garden plants and Omnicide kills most of them. This weakens the argument to the point of directly damaging the conclusion. (B) is so powerful that it actually supports the opposite of the conclusion. This isn’t something that a correct answer in a Weaken question needs to do, but it is something that frequently occurs. Just be mindful that while some answers overshoot the standard, it doesn’t mean that they’re setting the standard.

Answer Choice (A) says some of Omnicide's competitors kill almost as many species of insects as Omnicide does. This doesn't weaken the argument. If anything, this only explicitly confirms that the competitors do not kill as many insects as Omnicide does.

Answer Choice (C) says merely protecting plants from attack by insect pests does not guarantee that the plants will be healthy. This is irrelevant. It could have been relevant if the conclusion were about the general health of plants. If that were the case, then of course damage from insects is only a partial consideration. We would also want to control for things like sunlight, nutrition, soil conditions, etc. But the conclusion is just about protecting plants from harmful insects.

Answer Choice (D) says Omnicide is more profitable for the manufacturer than most of their other insecticides. This is a classic bait trying to attack an argument by attacking the source. It doesn't work. The strength of the reasoning doesn’t turn on the profits. It might explain why the company is advertising Omnicide as opposed to another of their products, but that’s not our job here.

Answer Choice (E) says Omnicide does not kill weeds or mammalian pests like gophers or groundhogs. Similar to (C), this is not relevant because the conclusion is just about protecting plants from harmful insects. Again, this could have been relevant if the conclusion were about protecting plants from harm in general. If that had been the case, then other weeds or mammalian pests would be relevant considerations.

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LSAT PrepTest 155 Explanations

Section 1 - Logical Reasoning

Section 2 - Logical Reasoning

Section 3 - Reading Comprehension

Section 4 - Logical Reasoning

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