Hypotheticals Forum

[Underdog180]

For logic games, I tend to write out hypotheticals/templates majority of the time. I was wondering if this is a normal strategy to attack the "if" questions? Of course some questions where I can answer it quickly from inferences and other restrictions I don't use hypotheticals, but overall, majority of the time I use this as my weapon to attack questions. I'm not sure how I feel about this since in a way it's time consuming but on the other hand it's better than being clueless and pondering the whole time. Any advice?

[jortiz682]

Make sure you check past hypotheticals to see if any are valid. I put a star next to good hypotheticals and a big X next to bad ones so I know what ones to look at. Usually the first Q of each game will give you 1 hypothetical, so keep that in mind too.

[Manhattan LSAT Noah]

People mean different things when they say "hypotheticals and templates" but for "if" questions, you do want to explore the meaning of the new condition, so writing that out is good. Writing out all the possibilities, or even one possibility, is a version of time-consuming trial and error. Even a strong logic gamer will resort to that sometimes, but it's best to push away to a more nuanced, inference-based approach.

In brief, when solving "if questions", for must be true questions, you should aim for being able to diagram out the answer (this isn't always possible, but usually is). for could be true/false questions, you'll want to diagram all the inferrable parts so that it's easier to evaluate the remaining possibilities - I often ask myself "what's left?" and write those elements in a cloud to help me think.