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Hello.
In LR, there are sometimes convoluted wording(at least for me) and I always get stuck...
For example, "Do you feel it is possible that none of the candidates would not vote to increase taxes?"
actually means"Do you feel it is possible that all of the candidates would vote to increase taxes?"

Currently, I am stuck with this sentence.
"Contrary to what many people seem to believe, however it is not neccessary to deny this fact in order to reject the view that tobacco companies should be held either morally or legally responsible for the poor health of smokers."

English is not my first language, but I am comfortable using it. It is just whenver I see these tricky wordings, I prone to translate to my native language first and get confuse more. If you know any tricks or advice, please help me.

Thank you for reading this.

epokei wrote:Hello.
In LR, there are sometimes convoluted wording(at least for me) and I always get stuck...
For example, "Do you feel it is possible that none of the candidates would not vote to increase taxes?"
actually means"Do you feel it is possible that all of the candidates would vote to increase taxes?"

Currently, I am stuck with this sentence.
"Contrary to what many people seem to believe, however it is not neccessary to deny this fact in order to reject the view that tobacco companies should be held either morally or legally responsible for the poor health of smokers."

English is not my first language, but I am comfortable using it. It is just whenver I see these tricky wordings, I prone to translate to my native language first and get confuse more. If you know any tricks or advice, please help me.

Thank you for reading this.

Are you using the LR bible? They have an in-depth explanation about logical opposites.
"All" as your example shows is NOT the opposite of "None"
Instead, the sentence "None is Not..." actually means "Some is..."

As for the other, I don't know any "tricks" since I never had to learn it that way before but I think if you break up the phrases, it may turn out to be easier for you; you seem to have problems when it becomes wordy.

"it is not necessary to deny this fact in order to reject the view..."
Divide the phrase:
"it is not necessary to.."
"deny this fact"
"in order"
"to reject the view"
"that..."

The first divided phrase, "it is not necessary to.." just simply means the second part is not a necessity meaning it does not have to occur, in this case, people "denying this fact." But we see that it is not necessary for this denial to happen "in order" for the other condition to occur, this being "rejection of the view." We end it by seeing what that view is (tobacco companies being held morally responsible).

So to put it plainly, "the denial of this fact is not necessary for the rejection of to reject the view that tobacco companies..."

ETA: Perhaps changing verbs into nouns etc when there are too many verbs might help you as well in terms of organizing it in a clear manner. (blah I just reread what I wrote sorry, I'm a horrible teacher)

epokei wrote:For example, "Do you feel it is possible that none of the candidates would not vote to increase taxes?"
actually means"Do you feel it is possible that all of the candidates would vote to increase taxes?"

^This is correct.

FantasticMrFox wrote:"All" as your example shows is NOT the opposite of "None"
Instead, the sentence "None is Not..." actually means "Some is..."

^This is not.

epokei wrote:It is just whenver I see these tricky wordings, I prone to translate to my native language first and get confuse more.

Translating is often a bad idea. For example, in English, negatives are treated mathematically. A single negative is a negative. A negative times a negative is a positive. A negative times a negative times a negative is a negative.

I don't have cake = I don't have cake.
I don't have no cake = I do have cake.
I don't not have no cake = I don't have cake.

But Spanish, for instance, ignores the math concepts. Once negative always negative.

So "I don't have no cake" (literally meaning "I do have cake" in English) would translate (word for word) as "Yo no tengo ninguna torta," which means I don't have cake.

I'm not sure how your native tongue treats negatives, but I suspect that there are nuances in every language that make it dangerous to try and work LSAT problems after translating them.

I think of it from a "double negative" stand point. every time there are 2 or more negation words like "no, not, none, nobody, hardly, scarcely, neither, nowhere, nothing, anti- etc.." in one part of the sentence, you can mathematically count it out as that every 2 negatives will cancel each other out. if there's still one negative word left then it will negate the sentence, otherwise they knock each other out.

ex: I won't take no other car and not hardly the blue car.

which means: I will take another car and the blue car. (this is valid, even if it doesn't feel like it flows well)

Process: each of the pairs of "won't,no" and "not, hardly" canceled each other out, leaving the sentence positive.

thoughts?

epokei wrote:Hello.
In LR, there are sometimes convoluted wording(at least for me) and I always get stuck...
For example, "Do you feel it is possible that none of the candidates would not vote to increase taxes?"
actually means"Do you feel it is possible that all of the candidates would vote to increase taxes?"

Yes, this is correct.

epokei wrote:Currently, I am stuck with this sentence.
"Contrary to what many people seem to believe, however it is not neccessary to deny this fact in order to reject the view that tobacco companies should be held either morally or legally responsible for the poor health of smokers."

This just means, basically, that you can reject this view for other reasons; not just by denying this fact.

Ocean64 wrote:I think of it from a "double negative" stand point. every time there are 2 or more negation words like "no, not, none, nobody, hardly, scarcely, neither, nowhere, nothing, anti- etc.." in one part of the sentence, you can mathematically count it out as that every 2 negatives will cancel each other out. if there's still one negative word left then it will negate the sentence, otherwise they knock each other out.

ex: I won't take no other car and not hardly the blue car.

thoughts?

If there are two negations of a single term, this works (She is not unhappy = She is happy, at least if we assume you must be either happy or unhappy) but this is not terribly common on the LSAT. More frequently sentences are confusing because multiple elements of the sentence are negated. To simplify these sentences, you can't always just cancel out both negative elements. Example:

The girls not dancing are not happy.
The girls dancing are happy.

These two sentences mean very different things, simply cancelling out both negations doesn't work.

I still get confuse(much less though) and takes extra time to fully understand, so I might come back to this topic again.
But for sure all of your advice helped me organizing my mess in my brain... So thank you again, you all are so kind to take your time to answer my question.

Verity wrote:The girls not dancing are not happy.

i get what you mean, but here we have dancing and happy, 2 separate things being negated, and this is easy to spot and understand, i guess i should've clarified that i was taking about convoluted sentences where they are usually referring to a single thing/action. the other thing is that they can only convoluted the meaning so much with double negative in the English language before you max out, and like you said this is not terribly common, but where i found it, it seemed to work well for me...so far.

Ocean64 wrote:

Verity wrote:The girls not dancing are not happy.

i get what you mean, but here we have dancing and happy, 2 separate things being negated, and this is easy to spot and understand, i guess i should've clarified that i was taking about convoluted sentences where they are usually referring to a single thing/action. the other thing is that they can only convoluted the meaning so much with double negative in the English language before you max out, and like you said this is not terribly common, but where i found it, it seemed to work well for me...so far.

suspicious android wrote this, not me.

Verity wrote:suspicious android wrote this, not me.

your forgiveness lol