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Would appreciate it if people can verify that the third premise is irrelevant to finding the correct answer

C (cattle ranchers)
S (ski resort owners)
W (like long winters)
L (lawyers)

The first two premises give us:

C--> ~W
S--> W

Third premise yields:

L <--(some)--> C --> ~W
The third premise above also allows us to conclude that some lawyers do not like long winters which is a formal logic chain that is commonly tested on the LSAT.

But really isn't this third premise is unnecessary to answer the question correctly, right? I feel like its thrown in there just to distract us. All we need are the first two premises. Putting and L to the left of the first premise yields

L --> C --> ~W
S --> W

therefore if we take the contrapositive of the first premise and link it to the second we arrive at the conclusion:

S --> W --> ~C --> ~L (Ski resort owners are not Lawyers)

Yes, the 'some' statement could have been left off. It's there to distract you.

It's actually probably there to introduce the 'lawyers' element early, so that you're already thinking about them. If they plop in the lawyers for the first time in the conclusion, it's maybe a bit TOO easy to see what you clearly need. The irrelevant 'some' statement puts just a tad of hesitation in.

Thanks Christine!

Would you mind also taking a look at PT 18 section 2 question 8. I read all the explanations for it on the manhattan lr forum but did not see anyone mention the whole-to-part/part-to-whole flaw. Is that not happening in this question?

I thought that might have been the flaw to attack here.
The stimulus is saying:

Homicide rate increased by 50%
Usually the weapon used was a knife
Most deaths are b/c of unpremeditated assaults within family
unpremeditated assaults within the family would not result in deaths if it were not for knives
Govt's fault for not regulating knives

We are going from homicide rates in general, to a smaller subset of homicides that occur within the family. The unwarranted assumption being made is that because homicides in general are bc of knives, that homicides occurring within the family must also involve knives (what is true of the whole is true of the part). So I looked for an answer choice that matched my pre-phrase of saying that hey maybe knives aren't involved in household homicides. That is why I almost selected A until I realized it was out of scope bc we are dealing with murders that are not premeditated (those tricky bastards). Eventually I did end up selecting the correct answer in answer choice E.

If most homicides involve a knife and most homicides occur within the family then the only thing we can conclude is that some homicides within the family involve a knife. Right? So it could be true that most homicides within the family do not involve knives, in fact maybe only a very very small percentage of unpremeditated domestic assaults involve knives. I feel like if you don't realize that knives don't have to be prevalent in unpremeditated domestic assaults, then you would have a hard time selecting E on account that it would seem to challenge a stated premise in the stimulus which is not the right way to weaken an argument on the LSAT.

Does any of this make sense? What are your thoughts on this one? A(once i realized the scope) C and D were very easy for me to eliminate. Got a little hung up on B in terms of how it affects the argument. But even if these assaults were underreported that would still have no effect on the argument right?

Am I over thinking this?