Sign up to star your favorites LSAT 60 - Section 3 - Question 17
May 13, 2012Sign up to star your favorites LSAT 137 - Section 3 - Question 17
May 13, 2012
Summary
Any food that is not sterilized and sealed can contain disease-causing bacteria.
Any food that has been sterilized and properly sealed does not contain bacteria.
Some acceptable food-preservation techniques involve sterilizing and sealing food.
Some acceptable food-preservation techniques involve slowing the growth of disease-causing bacteria.
Some acceptable food-preservation techniques may destroy natural food enzymes that cause food to spoil or discolor quickly.
Any food that has been sterilized and properly sealed does not contain bacteria.
Some acceptable food-preservation techniques involve sterilizing and sealing food.
Some acceptable food-preservation techniques involve slowing the growth of disease-causing bacteria.
Some acceptable food-preservation techniques may destroy natural food enzymes that cause food to spoil or discolor quickly.
Notable Valid Inferences
It is possible to preserve food in an acceptable way without entirely eliminating disease-causing bacteria.
If a food has been preserved without being sterilized or sealed, that food could contain disease-causing bacteria.
If a food has been preserved without being sterilized or sealed, that food could contain disease-causing bacteria.
A
All food preserved by an acceptable method is free of disease-causing bacteria.
Must be false. The stimulus states that some acceptable food-preservation techniques involve slowing the growth of disease-causing bacteria, rather than eliminating them completely.
B
Preservation methods that destroy enzymes that cause food to spoil do not sterilize the food.
Could be false. The stimulus is vague about which techniques destroy natural food enzymes, so it’s possible that a sterilization technique might do so.
C
Food preserved by a sterilization method is less likely to discolor quickly than food preserved with other methods.
Could be false. The stimulus is vague about which techniques destroy natural food enzymes and thereby cause food to discolor less quickly, so it’s possible that sterilization does not have this effect.
D
Any nonsterilized food preserved by an acceptable method can contain disease-causing bacteria.
Must be true. The stimulus explicitly states that any food that has not been both sterilized and properly sealed can contain disease-causing bacteria!
E
If a food contains no bacteria, then it has been preserved by an acceptable method.
Could be false. The stimulus doesn’t say that only sterilized and sealed (and thus acceptably preserved) food can be bacteria-free; rather, it tells us that all food that has been sterilized and sealed is bacteria-free. (E) confuses the necessary and sufficient conditions.
Sign up to star your favorites LSAT 60 - Section 1 - Question 17
May 13, 2012Sign up to star your favorites LSAT 138 - Section 4 - Question 17
May 13, 2012Sign up to star your favorites LSAT 59 - Section 3 - Question 17
May 13, 2012Sign up to star your favorites LSAT 131 - Section 3 - Question 17
May 13, 2012
"Surprising" Phenomenon
Why do people enjoy seeing so many movies when most have recycled plots?
Objective
The correct answer will offer an unsatisfactory hypothesis, one that fails to explain why people enjoy seeing movies with unoriginal plots. Every wrong answer, meanwhile, will give a reason for people to enjoy these movies anyway.
A
Movies based on standard plots are more likely to be financially successful than are ones based on original plots.
This is a consequence of those movies’ popularity, not a reason for it. It does not explain why people choose to see them.
B
If the details of their stories are sufficiently different, two movies with the same basic plot will be perceived by moviegoers as having different plots.
This explains why people will see multiple movies with similar plots. If they do not notice that a film's plot is unoriginal, they will not be turned off by that unoriginality.
C
Because of the large number of movies produced each year, the odds of a person seeing two movies with the same general plot structure in a five-year period are fairly low.
This explains why people see new movies each year. Although most movies use recycled plots, the particular movies a given person sees are unlikely to share plots very often.
D
A certain aesthetic pleasure is derived from seeing several movies that develop the same plot in slightly different ways.
This explains why people will see multiple movies every year. They see an unoriginal plot as a positive, one that makes a movie more enjoyable.
E
Although most modern movie plots have been used before, most of those previous uses occurred during the 1940s and 1950s.
This explains why people continue to watch movies even though their plots are largely recycled. Because the movies first using those plots are so old, few viewers have seen them, so the plots are largely novel to the people watching.
Sign up to star your favorites LSAT 59 - Section 2 - Question 17
May 13, 2012Sign up to star your favorites LSAT 131 - Section 2 - Question 17
May 13, 2012
Summary
The author concludes that a teacher should never pretend to know the answer to a question asked by a student. Why? Because students are aware when a teacher pretends to know something, and teachers should never do anything that causes students to lose respect for them.
Missing Connection
The conclusion is about a very specific action (pretending to know the answer), and we know that teachers should preserve respect at all costs. So, the premises would lead to the conclusion if we knew that students lose respect for a teacher when they sense that teachers are feigning knowledge.
A
A teacher cannot be effective unless he or she retains the respect of students.
The argument doesn’t address effectiveness. We need to conclude that teachers shouldn’t pretend to know things.
B
Students respect honesty above all else.
We do not need to know what students respect most. We need to know how to avoid losing the respect of students. We cannot assume that just because students respect honesty above everything else, that dishonesty will lose their respect.
C
Students’ respect for a teacher is independent of the amount of knowledge they attribute to that teacher.
This is, if anything, trying to weaken the argument: If student respect has nothing to do with knowledge, then the teacher won’t lose respect when they pretend due to lack of knowledge. It still isn’t a Weaken answer, because they could lose respect due to the lying itself.
D
Teachers are able to tell when students respect them.
Irrelevant. Based on the information we have, we don’t know that a teacher’s awareness of student respect doesn’t change it for the better or worse.
E
Students lose respect for teachers whenever they sense that the teachers are trying to hide their ignorance.
This provides a link from something we know to be true (students can sense when teachers are faking) to something we’ve been told must be avoided (loss of respect). So, teachers should not fake it.