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Hey folks,

Throughout my LSAT practice and drilling i've noticed that, especially in necessary assumption questions, sometimes I am able to prephrase an assumption that turns out to be the answer right away and other times I only find a few assumptions but then end up choosing an answer that is correct but not the assumption that I prephrased. Other times I am not able to find any assumptions after reading the stimulus and then go into the answer choices eliminating clear wrong ones and negating others and still get the answer 80% of the time in about 1:30.

My question to the top scorers: Is this normal? Do many of you also experience similar things on these types of questions?

Thank you.

Just remember with Necessary Assumption types that there are unlimited necessary assumptions that you would have to make. For example:

"John is looking for a car that will make him happy. Car #3 has great gas mileage. Therefore, Car #3 makes John happy." A necessary assumption would be that John is made happy by great gas mileage. Another necessary assumption is that John has the capacity to be happy after his 7th traumatic divorce in just over two years, and that John has the mental capacity to "look" after that nasty uranium accident he was in, but those probably won't be on there.

You'll probably prephrase multiple assumptions that are much more sensible than that, but just keep in mind that there are scores and scores and scores of assumptions you can be made. It's not a bad thing that sometimes you can't prephrase it and have to use the process of elimination. Prephrasing helps, but it's not necessary. A lot of times all of the answer choices will be very obscure anyway so you'll have to look closely at them to figure out the correct answer. Just keep on thinking ahead as you are and you'll be golden.

The above poster brings up a lot of good points. The number of NAs are basically infinite, where as SAs are more limited. So even if your prephase doesn't appear it helps to get you thinking and if you have to use negation to find the right answer that's a really good way to utilize process of elimination. (In case you don't know, negation means, when you negate the answer choice the actual nexessary assumption will destroy the argument) so in his example above if you negate to "he doesn't have the capacity to be happy after his 7th divorce" will destroy the argument

Thank you all.