When being skeptical makes all answers unacceptable Forum

[mcpng]

One skill I pick up from training for the LSAT is that you have to be cautious about what can be inferred and what can't...
one of the things i do is questions asking which helps to explain a situation or which is most strongly supported, and even the less ambiguous types like which can be inferred, is to run a simulation of what if that answer choice were taken...once i run into a contradiction, and i have to do it fast in LR, i can eliminate that answer....


except...that...
you can't be TOO skeptical. LSAC saves its "S" with the disclaimer that you pick the BEST answer...but many wrong answers require you to make some assumptions outside the stimulus alone, and you have to figure out when your assumptions are too far fetched...you have to play with this scale until only ONE answer is accepted...and needless to say, to do that, you need to have the correct, LSAC mentality, in how your scale is linearized...that is to say, you need to agree with the LSAC setters that, for example the assumption that "fish all have fins" is more acceptable than "fish all have tails" or vice versa and decide which one will be the LSAC required answer.

for one example, look at LR 51 section 1 question 21. Many of you would have breezed past it and be thinking about me: "Stupid fool. You just aren't 170 material like ME, muhahaha!!!". Some may say "Oh gosh that one was a bit hard, kinda dense, kinda confusing".

The correct answer is D, but the stimulus doesn't actually support it. It just doesn't flat out contradict it.

Look at B. Wrong answer. But the stimulus doesn't actually logically lead to it being a wrong answer. Neither does it support it explicitly.

You weigh them both, and you say, ahhh...D. HO HO HO merry christmas!
Others might say...ahh...B. BAM!!! You lose!!!!!

[rayiner]

for one example, look at LR 51 section 1 question 21. Many of you would have breezed past it and be thinking about me: "Stupid fool. You just aren't 170 material like ME, muhahaha!!!". Some may say "Oh gosh that one was a bit hard, kinda dense, kinda confusing".

The correct answer is D, but the stimulus doesn't actually support it. It just doesn't flat out contradict it.

Look at B. Wrong answer. But the stimulus doesn't actually logically lead to it being a wrong answer. Neither does it support it explicitly.

You weigh them both, and you say, ahhh...D. HO HO HO merry christmas!
Others might say...ahh...B. BAM!!! You lose!!!!!

D is a perfectly valid (and the only valid) conclusion from the designer's statements.

The setup has two major claims, C1 (first sentence) and C2 (last sentence). There is a dependent claim C1.5 that has a predicate P1, and C2 has a predicate P2.

C2 basically says: if P2 -> R.

B) Depends on the reasoning that !P2 -> !R. That's logically faulty, so B is wrong.
D) Is not only not inconsistent with the statements, it can be proved directly by applying C1.5.

[tomwatts]

Okay, am I looking at the right question? I'm seeing the one about the garden and living room. But I'm confused, because your (the OP's) description doesn't fit this question at all. Here's why.

The first sentence says, "Any garden and adjoining living room that are separated from one another by sliding glass doors can visually merge into a single space." That's any of them at all, regardless. D says, "A garden can visually merge with an adjoining living room into a single space even if the garden does not contribute strong visual interest of its own." Well, apparently any garden can visually merge with an adjoining living room into a single space as long as there are sliding glass doors there — the visual interest thing is irrelevant.

B is wrong because the last sentence of the arg says that if the garden is well coordinated and contributes strong visual interest, it will visually merge into a single space, but the answer choice says that if it's not well-coordinated, it's not going to visually merge. That's not the contrapositive of the conditional that we were given; it's not even really the inverse. It's just crap.

I should add there there are "most strongly supported" answers that definitely depend on your idea of reasonableness. The right answer is definitely the most strongly supported, but it doesn't have to be true based on the information provided. This just isn't one of those.

[rayiner]

I should add there there are "most strongly supported" answers that definitely depend on your idea of reasonableness. The right answer is definitely the most strongly supported, but it doesn't have to be true based on the information provided. This just isn't one of those.

In my experience, almost every LSAT question can be solved without stooping to "most strongly". There are maybe one question every few PTs where the wrong answer choices aren't clearly wrong.

[7ED]

I should add there there are "most strongly supported" answers that definitely depend on your idea of reasonableness. The right answer is definitely the most strongly supported, but it doesn't have to be true based on the information provided. This just isn't one of those.

In my experience, almost every LSAT question can be solved without stooping to "most strongly". There are maybe one question every few PTs where the wrong answer choices aren't clearly wrong.

+1. Definitely one or two questions every 2 or 3 practice exams that can be a tad ambiguous. But usually u can definitely figure out the right answer.

[tomwatts]

I should add there there are "most strongly supported" answers that definitely depend on your idea of reasonableness. The right answer is definitely the most strongly supported, but it doesn't have to be true based on the information provided. This just isn't one of those.

In my experience, almost every LSAT question can be solved without stooping to "most strongly". There are maybe one question every few PTs where the wrong answer choices aren't clearly wrong.

Right, yes, they're pretty rare.