Prep Test 6

KAPLAN LSAT PREP

LSAT RELEASED TEST VI EXPLAINED A Guide to the October, 1992 LSAT

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SECTION I: READING COMPREHENSION

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Passage 1—Taft-Hartley Act (Q. 1-6) Topic and Scope: “Right-to-work” legislation; specifically, the impact of such laws on the wages of minority workers. Purpose and Main Idea: The author’s purpose is to examine a variety of studies, many of them in disagreement, about how (and indeed whether) right-to-work laws have impacted wages. This is done more in the manner of a survey than an argument; hence, the “main idea” is little more than the general statement in lines 30-32 that studies like Carroll’s (and the “pioneering” one of Ashenfelter) have “important implications,” most notably that Black workers’ wages may be depressed by right-to-work laws. Paragraph Structure: ¶1 begins by describing what “right-to-work” is: a reaction to unionshop agreements that force everyone to become a member. In a state with right-to-work laws, a worker need not join a union. Lines 9 and on switch to the impact of such laws, and the view that that impact is negligible “has not gone uncriticized,” notably by Carroll. He asserts (lines 20-25) that right-to-work hurts workers not directly but indirectly, by weakening union bargaining power and hence (lines 28-29) lowering wages. ¶2 shifts the focus to demographics, specifically to minority workers, whom the author believes (lines 32-36) may be hurt more in right-to-work states than in states having a union shop, since unions tend to have a positive impact on minority wages. Lines 41-66 are where the passage gets most torturous, and where you the reader have to be careful to get the gist of what’s going on and not get discouraged if the specifics seem to elude you. A good strategy may be to start with the “pioneering” Ashenfelter—i.e. someone the author likes; get a sense of his view, and then figure out what Ashenfelter is reacting against. Here the scope narrows even further, to compare two types of unions. Craft unions, Ashenfelter finds (lines 49-53), have tended to exclude Blacks, and thus White craftspeople tend to make more than Black craftspeople; but things are very different in industrial unions, where (lines 55-58) Blacks’ and Whites’ wages tend to be much closer. All of this should make clearer what’s going on in lines 41-47. Instead of comparing union vs. nonunion wages, Ashenfelter (and our author) imply, we are wiser to compare the impact of right-to-work on different types of unions. If we do so, the passage implies, we will see that the author’s indirect and tentative confirmation to the scenario posed in lines 32-36 is Yes, Black unionized workers are likely to do better, and Black workers in right-to-work states are generally going to be hurt economically—unless, as we see at the very end, the economy in general improves, thus creating a general demand for labor.

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The Big Picture: • Section Management strategies should always be in the forefront of your mind. How did many test-takers decide that this was a good passage to hold for later? It’s long. It’s boring (no offense to labor law buffs). It begins in a heavily factual way; the author’s views don’t appear early. Most of the passage is devoted to a factual recounting of the views of others; the author is only occasionally present (e.g. lines 11-12, and 20-32), and the author’s main idea is ambiguous, at best (notice that the questions don’t include a typical “main idea / primary purpose” question.) Finally, new concepts are introduced right up until the final sentence; economic growth, labor shortages—it just never seems to end. . . For these reasons, the reading challenge in this one is tougher for examinees than, say, Passages 2 and 3 in this section. Most people are better off saving a tough passage like #1 until later in the Reading Comp. section when, having gotten points under your belt and (one hopes) set aside time to spend, you can dig into a tough passage in a relaxed and thoughtful way. • You must begin every passage, especially a thorny one like this, with a solid foundation, which means the opening 1/3 of text. Take your time! Read and think about and paraphrase the opening sentences carefully. (In this passage, for instance, it was critical that you understood what “right-to-work” is, and what the pro and con issues are, before proceeding further.) If you go for a mere “skim,” you’re likely to need one or more time-consuming re-readings later on, in order to get a handle on what’s what. Spending time thinking about the opening 1/3, in fact, saves time. • Don’t lose sight of the passage’s scope as it moves—or in this case, crawls—along. Especially note places in which the author explicitly narrows the scope, such as here, when he moves from right-to-work’s impact on workers in general in ¶1 to its impact on minority workers in ¶2. The Questions: 1. (E) As if it weren’t bad enough that the section begins with a tough passage, the passage begins with one of the toughest question types, akin to Parallel Reasoning in the LR sections. On top of that, to get the answer, you have to reread a lot of context: Though the question stem’s “literature” is mentioned at line 9, it’s not described until lines 13-17, by the critic of that literature, Mr. Carroll. He says that the researchers believe the right-to-work laws have minimal impact because they have simply looked at whether the laws have decreased union membership and said, “Hey, they haven’t, so there’s no impact.” In the same way, (E)’s transit system asserts that a fare hike has had no negative effects simply because ridership hasn’t decreased. In both cases, a look at sheer numbers prompts a hasty conclusion that may not be supported by other relevant data. (A)’s conclusion weighs benefits and disadvantages and states one side’s argument for why a law should be passed. That’s a recommendation, not at all similar to the value judgment regarding the impact of right-to-work laws found in lines 9-17.

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(B) includes evidence that amounts to a value judgment (“The well-off can afford the tax”) but, similar to (A), concludes with a strongly implied recommendation suggested by the proponents: The tax should be passed. It doesn’t conclude that “X has had no impact”— which is what we need. (C) The students pre- and post-curriculum change might seem to parallel the workers preand post- right-to-work laws. But nothing in lines 9-17 has a parallel to (C)’s charge of unfair treatment. (C) would work better if it went like so: “Since there are as many students since the curriculum change as there were before, the change has had no effect on the student body.” (D), far from concluding that a phenomenon (the new policy) has had no effect, concludes that its effect has been major. • Never succumb to the assumption that you need to, or should, attack LSAT questions in the order in which they’re printed. Feel free to skip tough ones in search of the quick and easy points that you know are there. Somewhere. 2. (C) “This point of view has not gone uncriticized. Thomas M. Carroll...” These sentences link Carroll to the controversial point of view in lines 9-11. Carroll takes exception, as (C) says, to the idea that right-to-work laws haven’t had an impact on wages. The rest of the ¶ goes on to elaborate how Carroll believes that the laws weaken unions and encourage manufacturer/supplier collusion. (A) Au contraire, this is the viewpoint Carroll rebuts. (B) Carroll’s study does see right-to-work laws as an impediment to unions, but we’re explicitly told (lines 21-23) that such laws do not reduce union membership. (D) Carroll’s study does not support, but rather criticizes, earlier research. (E) Carroll acknowledges that there’s an opportunity for collusion, but that’s all; we never hear about the mechanics of doing so. • Never answer a question based on your memory of the text. Go back to re-read the key passage(s) first. Taking those extra seconds will pay off in more right answers and a net gain of time. 3. (A) Craft unions are mentioned once and once only: as part of the “important fact,” cited by Ashenfelter, that minorities have been traditionally excluded from membership in such unions and that therefore craft unionism increases the gap between Black and White wages. (A) paraphrases this idea that, through craft unions, more money is earned by members (largely White) than non-members (most Blacks).

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(B) Nothing is said about increased membership in craft unions. If anything, the exclusion of a large number of workers would tend to depress the total. (C) is a distortion of the comparison between craft and industrial unions. Yes, the latter have more minority members and tend to reduce the Black/White wage differential, but we never learn anything about the rate at which wages rise in different unions. (D) We are told that right-to-work laws have a negative effect on wages of industrial workers, but we can infer that they would also affect the wages of craft union members who, as Ashenfelter reports, are mostly white. (E) misinterprets the point made at the end of ¶2 (which is rather far removed from the craft union reference). We know that a healthy economy can create a demand for workers and raise their wages. But there’s no way to tell from the info given which group—craft or industrial—would be more likely to experience wage increases under these circumstances. For all we know, the increase in wages brought on by labor shortages applies only to the industrial sector. • When the basis of a question is highly localized (as it is here, to lines 49-54), recognize that the further you move away from that detail, the more likely you are to move away from the correct answer. (Example: (E) here, almost 15 lines removed from the craft union reference.) 4. (E) This one follows up on Q. 3, because right after the author polishes off craft unions (line 54), he cites the more favorable situation in industrial unions, where Black workers have made wage gains. Correct choice (E) is, in fact, lines 55-58 almost verbatim. It’s Ashenfelter’s estimate, yes, but cited approvingly as if as fact by our author. (A), (B), (C) All of the “Prior to 1947”’s relate to the situation prior to the Taft-Hartley Act. But that appears in ¶1, long before industrial unions take center stage in this passage! Industrial unions are never explicitly related to the pre-right-to-work era, so none of these statements is remotely inferable. (D) Au contraire! (D) directly contradicts lines 55-58 as well as correct choice (E). • Sometimes, more than one answer choice is wrong for the same reason. 5. (B) The question assumes a “Yes” answer as to whether right-to-work weakens unions, and goes on to speculate about a counteracting force. The only place that that comes up is in the last sentence, where we learn that a possible exception would be a right-to-work state where the economy is booming. In such a case a demand for labor might drive wages up. (A) makes no sense. Decreasing the number of union shop agreements would most likely decrease the economic power of unions even more.

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(C), (E) Craft unions come up in the discussion of race-related wage differentials, but we cannot infer that either a decrease in craft union membership (C) or their decline in the labor market (E) would counteract the decrease of unions’ overall economic power in rightto-work states. (D) The idea of merging unions, whether weak or strong ones, is never mentioned, so we have no idea whether a merger would make any difference. • Think about where a question’s source in the passage is likely to be. Re-read that source, and pre-phrase an answer, before proceeding to the choices. 6. (D) This one should be manageable if you recognize the ¶ structure as we described it above. Carroll and Ashenfelter, each in his own sphere, take on misguided thinking about rightto-work laws, and the author merely gives them a forum to do so. So (D)’s “review of research that challenges earlier research” is the closest to the mark. (A) loses sight of the key question at the heart of the passage: Have right-to-work laws hurt workers? (A) ignores that question, and makes it sound as if the only issue is how to conduct research. (B) There are two pairs of competing ideas that take center stage here: the view that rightto-work has had no impact, vs. Carroll; and the tactic of comparing union workers to nonunion ones, vs. Ashenfelter. And to “reconcile” means to bring together, whereas our author seems to, overall, favor the two researchers mentioned. (C) The passage could be said to “critique” right-to-work laws in the sense that such laws depress wages, and disproportionately so for minorities. So (C) could be considered halfright, but its latter half is dead wrong. The author shows no interest in exploring or influencing future change. (E) No one “specific case” is cited. Yes, Ashenfelter is credited with a specific comparison between craft and industrial unions, but that’s buried in lines 47-58 and doesn’t deserve global prominence. Furthermore, far from confirming earlier studies, Carroll rebuts the interpretation of the previous “literature” of right-to-work laws, as it’s so called. • When answer choices (like these) are highly abstract, be sure to pre-phrase an answer first, and then go on to treat the language in the choices concretely— otherwise they’ll all sound good.

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Passage 2—Women Physicians In China (Q. 7-12) Topic and Scope: Women doctors in China; specifically, the need for women missionary doctors in the late 1800s. Purpose and Main Idea: The author’s purpose is to explain how it was that the influx of Western women doctors created opportunities for both Western and Chinese women; and the Main Idea is pretty much the passage’s first sentence. The structure and gist of the passage are made very clear from the very beginning—good news for test-takers. Paragraph Structure: ¶1 focuses on the missionary movement, and the changes that led to sending women doctors to China. The most notable change was the growth, from 1870 on, of women’s mission societies, which were much more eager to send single women overseas than were the traditional male-dominated mission boards; but the latter fell into line (lines 25-30) over time. ¶2 describes the conditions that Western women doctors found in China—conditions that you might have mentally summed up as “initial unease, then widespread acceptance.” Then, as promised in lines 3-4, ¶3 explains the impact of these developments on Chinese women, who first made use of the women doctors’ services and then began to be medically trained themselves, thus becoming able to crack the medical “glass ceiling” of its day and earn an independent living. ¶4 sums up, in rather general terms, the progress for women generally that was signaled by all of the above-described developments. The Big Picture: • Start reading and thinking at line one! A passage like this one dramatically illustrates how much of the “game plan” an author can give away as early as the very first sentence. Don’t wait for 12 lines to go by before you start thinking and paraphrasing. Get busy early! • In Reading Comp., promises made are promises kept. The first sentence promises a treatment of how opportunities arose for Western as well as Chinese women; we should expect each of those to be treated in turn. (And they are, in separate ¶s.) When an author makes promises, see to it that s/he keeps them. • The concept of “gist” comes into play in ¶1. You don’t have to understand all of the details, chapter and verse, of how women doctors came to China. Get a rough sense of it—“it was women who sent the women overseas”—and wait for the questions to demand that you read and understand more deeply than that.

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The Questions: 7. (E) This one is hard to pre-phrase, because the author says so very many things about Western women working abroad. But since the question speaks about missionaries only and leaves doctors out, you might have guessed that the answer must come out of ¶1, the ¶ that has the most to do with the missionary movement. Note, too, that all five choices say “before the 1870s,” which is ¶1’s time frame. For these reasons, you might have gone back to consult ¶1 in more depth before attacking the choices. As it happens, lines 15-16 spell out (E)’s inference that the typical pre-1870 women missionary went overseas with her husband. (A) There were few single women missionaries pre-1870, but we know nothing about the overall total. (B) Au contraire, the author states that the women’s societies didn’t start financing missionaries until 1870. (C), (D) Both topics—women nurses (C) and the pre-1870 location of women missionary work (D)—go unmentioned in the text. • Attack each question stem carefully for clues. Note, for instance, that here in Q. 7 the absence of a reference to doctors helps us determine which part of the passage to consult for the answer. 8. (D) “Exclusively male.” That hearkens back to ¶1. Scan for the phrase: it’s present at line 22. Study the context: The uniformly male members were “uniformly uneasy about” sending single women overseas. That “account[s] for [their] attitude,” as (D) has it, and ties into the purpose of the detail overall, to show how things changed when women’s societies began making the decisions. (A), (B), (C), and (E) all fall short because they make no mention whatsoever of the gender issue which is, after all, what the question is based upon. (A) trumps up a religious vs. secular distinction, (E) a distinction between work abroad and at home; (B) evokes Chinese women, who don’t show up until ¶3; and (C) brings in “professional qualifications,” which are never mentioned. • Quite often a Reading Comp. question stem will mention a potent word or phrase from the passage without putting it in quotes. (Often it’s a proper name; sometimes it’s a phrase like “exclusively male” here; see also Q. 11, below.) Follow up all clues! Use the potent word or phrase to help you locate where the answer is to be found.

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9. (A) Choices written this abstractly can be maddening. They all sound good at first reading, don’t they? Avoid a quagmire by pre-phrasing the organization on your own; it might go like so: “¶1 explains how single women doctors began to go over to China; and ¶s 2 and 3 show the impact of their presence within China.” The passage’s wonderful first sentence is the “situation” that correct choice (A) describes, and the rest of (A) is what we just discussed: the causes for that “situation,” and the results. (B) The author never “refutes” the assertion she makes in the first sentence. (B) makes it sound as if the passage is a give-and-take debate between two sides, rather than an already fully-reasoned argument. (C) Even if there were an “obstacle” kicking off the passage—which there isn’t—(C)’s use of future tense (“possible ways to overcome”) is a deal-breaker. This is an historical overview. (D) “Predicament” is no more appropriate here than (C)’s “obstacle.” And this overview of developments in the latter half of the 19th century hardly ends with “a recommendation.” (E) No drawbacks of having women doctors in China are mentioned. And what “eventual outcome” could be “predicted”? All those people are dead now. • By pre-phrasing an answer—however awkwardly or tentatively—to a question in which the choices are all abstract, you are less likely to be taken in by off-the-wall choices, and more likely to locate the right answer quickly. 10. (A) According to the author, the reason the 1870s began the increase in overseas single women missionaries was the rise of women’s groups as sponsors, in contrast to the all-male boards that were doing the sending previously. The right answer should cut the cord between the women’s groups and the missionaries, and that’s what (A) does. That the majority of overseas single women missionaries got no sponsorship from women’s groups strikes at the heart of the thesis in ¶1, and makes it necessary to search for another explanation for the same phenomenon. (B) speaks, perhaps, to the personal motivation of women wanting to serve overseas, but that doesn’t affect the author’s analysis of why in the 1870s more single women began to do so. (C) So women doctors were outnumbered by women teachers and translators. So what? Why else, except for the reason given by the author, did their number increase after 1870? (C) has no reply. (D) and (E) don’t, either, concentrating as they do on the nature of the women missionaries who went abroad. Nothing in these choices undermines the author’s contention that financial support from the newly-created women’s societies was responsible for the increase noted in the stem.

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• Undermining an argument in Reading Comp. requires the same work as in Logical Reasoning: locating the evidence and conclusion, examining the link between them, and severing that link in some way. It’s a little harder here, since you have to dig the argument in question out of 60 or so lines of text. But the process is the same. 11. (D) The stem’s reference to “Western women . . . physicians . . . in Canton” clearly sends us to ¶2. Rereading that ¶ for the reasons they became accepted reveals lines 33-38: Women doctors were a great advantage because they could treat women patients and maintain traditional female modesty. That last is the “cultural conventions” to which (D) refers, reinforced one ¶ later in lines 45-50. (A) Only if the number of male doctors was low would (A) possibly help to explain the acceptance of female doctors. But (A) doesn’t tell us what that number was, so (A) falls short. (B), (C) Talk about outside the scope! The Western sponsors and parishes are long forgotten by the time we get to ¶2. The local home parishes (C) have nothing to do with Western women physicians’ reception in China; and the sponsors (B) are merely the mechanism that got them there. (E) And why would relations between Chinese officials and Western missionary boards impact at all on women doctors’ acceptance in China? Far-fetched . . . and unsupported by the text in any case. • The harder you have to work to justify an answer choice, the more likely it is that that choice is wrong. Use the text to make the selection process less difficult.

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12. (D) Chinese medical practices come to the fore in ¶s 2 and 3. We don’t learn much, except for the issues of female modesty mentioned during our work on Q. 11. ¶3 asserts that many Chinese women would have been unlikely to seek medical treatment but for the presence of a female doctor in whose presence they’d (inferably) be more comfortable. This leads to (D)’s inference that, customarily, male doctors didn’t treat female patients. (A) contradicts the passage: many Chinese women began to avail themselves of Western medicine at this time (lines 45-50). (B) More women may have been treated at home than in hospitals, if the alternative was to see a male doctor. But (B)’s conclusion about overall medical care is unsupported by the text. (C) is wildly contrived. No financial obligation on the part of the doctor to the family is ever mentioned. All we learn is that medicine helped some Chinese women become financially independent. (E) If anything, ¶3 suggests that Chinese women didn’t ordinarily have the same educational opportunities that young men did, especially in medicine. (E) contradicts this. • Be on the lookout for overlapping questions in Reading Comp.: two or more questions that test, or revolve around, the same issues. Never assume that every question is independent of the others. Here, both Qs. 11 and 12 are related to the Chinese convention of female modesty mentioned in ¶s 2 and 3.

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Passage 3—Early Music Movement (Q. 13-20) Topic and Scope: Early music; specifically, the movement to have music performed as it was performed when it was written. Purpose and Main Idea: The author’s purpose is to explore the “questions” raised by this movement (which she describes as resembling a “crusade”), and that the questions are “profound and troubling” (lines 12-13) conveys her main idea. Paragraph Structure: ¶1 describes the early music movement, shoots it a little barb by way of the “crusade” reference, grants that the movement has been of value, and then presents the main-idea sentence that the rest of the passage follows up on: the “profound and troubling questions” raised by the movement. One would expect that what follows would explore at least some of those questions, and since two ¶s follow, it’s not surprising that those questions are two in number. To make the structure even clearer, the author supplies the nice “continuation” Keyword phrase “in addition” at the beginning of ¶3 to essentially say “that was one problem; now here’s another.” ¶2 explains that demanding that a piece be played on instruments available during its composition carries with it a built-in problem: What if a piece was composed with instruments in mind that hadn’t even been invented yet? In that case, performing the piece today on the earlier instrument that was available to the composer at the time would seem to degrade the artist’s vision. Beethoven’s first piano concerto is cited at length as one such piece. ¶3 poses a different “troubling” issue, expressed generally in lines 34-36 and illustrated by the tempo issue. The gist of it is that the conducting (lines 37-46) and setting (lines 46-60) of original tempos were both determined by different historical conditions from ours; and denying that amounts to “inadvertently [divorcing] music and its performance from . . . life”—something the author finds troubling and obviously opposes. The Big Picture: • Strive to become a good anticipatory reader. Consciously anticipate that when an author calls something “a crusade,” s/he may turn out to be critical of it. Consciously anticipate that when something “raises profound and troubling questions,” almost immediately those questions (at least one main one, and possibly even more than one) will be raised and addressed. Stay ahead of the author rather than several steps behind. • The Beethoven example in ¶2, and the two tempo examples in ¶3, are pretty technical for non-musicians to understand. Content yourself with understanding them in broad outline (as discussed above), and delve deeper only when the questions seem to demand that you do so.

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The Questions: 13. (D) Line 30 appears in ¶2, whose purpose is to attack the assumption on the part of early music advocates that composers necessarily write for the instruments that exist at the time. Reread the whole deal, from line 20 on. A piano “exactly contemporary with” Beethoven’s first piano concerto would, we are told at the end, frustrate Beethoven. Sure, it would irritate him to have to play the “bad” F-natural, because the instrument of the time lacked the high F-sharp that existed only in the composer’s imagination and not on the instrument itself. As (D) has it, a piano contemporary with Beethoven’s first piano concerto would be incapable of playing the high F-sharp that the melody calls for. (Note that the actual score was written to accommodate the range of the limited piano—hence the “wrong” note, the high Fnatural that must have driven Ludwig batty.) (A) The phenomenon of the inaudible time-keeping piano comes out of ¶3, and is not associated with either Beethoven or line 30. (B) Au contraire—check out lines 23-25 again. Pianos in Beethoven’s day lacked the F-sharp, not the F-natural. (C) Mozart and Haydn appear only in ¶3, so there’s no reason to connect them to ¶2’s piano, and no reason to assume that all three composers couldn’t have used the same piano type. (E) First of all, as far as we know, Beethoven only contemplated revising his earlier work. And besides, it wouldn’t have been the piano contemporary to the first concerto that would have prompted Beethoven’s revisions, but rather the more expansive and versatile piano that came later on. • When a question mentions a line reference, be sure to think about the overall purpose of the ¶ in which the line reference appears. Often, context is everything. • Beware of choices that spring from details from the wrong part of the passage. (A) and (C) are good examples of this common wrong answer type. 14. (A) This one is pretty much a slam dunk, reflecting as it does the crucial sentence in lines 11-13: The early music approach “raises profound and troubling questions” with respect to performance. As mentioned above, this sentence is pregnant with promise—what are these problems?—and the answer is found in the remaining two ¶s. (B) gives the early music movement too much credit—“largely successful” is not a judgment the author makes—and to narrow the rest of the passage discussion merely to “the use of obsolete instruments” leaves out most of what drives ¶s 2 and 3: Beethoven’s imagined piano, the time-beating problem, and the tempo issues. (C) keys off of a problem alluded to in ¶2 but falls far short of summing up the entire passage.

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(D), (E) Neither the lack (D), nor the incomplete use (E), of information is ever alluded to as central to the author’s interest in the early music movement. • When you’re confident about an answer choice early in the set, you should still at least glance at the remaining choices, but in a different way: with less respect. Don’t waste time evaluating them in depth; your task has shifted to simply making sure they’re as bad as they need to be, considering that you’re pretty sure you already have the winner. It may not seem like this will save you much time, but a few seconds gained on a handful of questions could very well add up to an extra minute or two by the end of the section. 15. (D) The first piano concerto is introduced at line 20, and as such it acts as the “evidence,” mentioned in the previous sentence, that such eminent composers as Beethoven imagined weird notes that the instruments of the day couldn’t play. In particular, the piece features that high F-sharp that only some hypothetical future piano could hit. (D) expresses not only the point of mentioning the concerto, but the essence of ¶2 overall as a problem with the early music movement’s premises. (A) has it backwards. Beethoven was forced to include a “wrong” note in his score because the pianos at the time couldn’t accommodate the correct melody. Only later did the range of pianos expand. (B) Au contraire, Beethoven explicitly did anticipate the more sophisticated piano of the future as he imagined notes that contemporary pianos couldn’t hit. (C) We’re told only that Beethoven thought about revising his earlier works, from which we can’t infer that a revised version of his first piano concerto actually exists. Thus, Beethoven’s first piano concerto is not used here to show that early music advocates stick to original scores despite later revisions, because we don’t even know that there is a revised score for this piece. (E) Au contraire again—the piano available at the time Beethoven wrote the first piano concerto frustrated the great composer’s intentions by lacking the high F-sharp called for by the melody. • Check the context of any detail mentioned in a question stem. Often the detail’s purpose is made clear (as it is here) by the text that directly precedes or follows it. • Beware of au-contraire choices, choices that provide the opposite of what we’re looking for. Here, there are no fewer than three wrong choices that seem to contradict the information in the passage.

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16. (B) Any reference to tempo must direct your attention to ¶3, and the reference to the Mozart/Beethoven movements to lines 46-56. The last movement, we’re told (lines 49-50), was played slower in the 19th century than it is now, and the author explains why: Today, audiences don’t applaud after each movement (as they used to) but only at the very end, and as a result “musicians [are] forced into extra brilliance at the finale in order to generate applause.” If that habit were broken, if concerts went back to the old way—here’s (B)—then it would be reasonable to suppose that the musicians wouldn’t need to crank the tempo up at the end to generate audience enthusiasm; they’d probably slow it down to the old tempo. (A) refers back to the wrong ¶. It’s ¶2 that is concerned with instrument design. (C) is the current practice, the one that causes a fast-paced finale. (D) The inaudible piano is a separate issue from the one alluded to in the question; it drops out as of line 46. (E) Nowhere are we told that Wolfgang Amadeus and Ludwig Van did their own conducting, not to mention what relation, if any, that would have to tempo. • Even when a question stem doesn’t direct you to a specific ¶ or sentence, you need to consider where in the passage the relevant text is likely to be found. This is why it’s so important to construct a mental roadmap of the passage as you read through the first time. 17. (B) The second “troubling question” raised by the early music movement is its “divorc[ing of] music and its performance from . . . life” (lines 34-36). That criticism is followed up in ¶3 by two specific examples: the inappropriate inclusion of the “silent” time-keeping piano, and the change in tempos due to changes in audience behavior. (B) is right on the money. (A) The author is not in the business of “undermining” his own assertion, and the only things he “rejects” are some of the premises of the early music movement, but that’s not what (A) refers to. (C) ¶3 begins not with a statement of the movement’s assumptions, but an indictment of one of its practices. That indictment is subsequently supported, not undermined. (D) That phrase “frequently provided” is curious—what’s it based on? Anyway, ¶3’s evidence is approvingly cited, not “critically evaluated.” (E) The “two specific cases” (the silent piano; the tempo examples) are preceded by a criticism (lines 34-36) that they’re there to support. (E) has it backwards. • Use your Kaplan materials to get more familiar with the abstract rhetoric terms used in LSAT questions like this one, especially “generalization,” “assumption,” and “evaluation.” (See also Q. 24, below.)

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18. (D) You can’t weaken an argument until you’ve confirmed its evidence and conclusion. The phrase “can readily be explained by” tells you that the conclusion has just been mentioned and the evidence is about to follow. So: The tempo differences between Mozart’s and Beethoven’s day and our own is explained in terms of audience custom: Since in the old days audiences applauded throughout the piece, the tempos during the piece were faster back then; since today’s audiences only applaud at the end, the tempo at the end is faster now. But if, as (D) says, the applause during the piece was minimal—if the real applause came at the end—then the customs of yesterday’s and today’s audiences aren’t all that different, and an explanation of the differences in tempo must be sought elsewhere. (A) and (E) are outside the scope: Neither the musicians’ amount of training (A), nor the audience’s knowledgeability (E), is remotely cited here, let alone cited as relevant to the tempo issue. (B) The fact that breaks may have been longer then than now doesn’t relate in any meaningful way to the explanation offered by the author, which focuses on the effect of audience reaction on tempo. What happens at the end of each section is the relevant issue here. We cannot infer what effects on audience reaction, and by extension, performance tempo, the length of the breaks between sections would have. (C) may be tempting, since the author does seem to see a relationship between the tempo at which music is played and the audience applause that is desired. But (C) assumes that the phrase “concern with the audience response” translates to the seeking of applause—which it needn’t; and the argument certainly doesn’t hinge on there being parity of concern between yesterday’s musicians and today’s. So even if (C) is true, the author’s explanation is not affected. • Be careful when reading the question stem; the inclusion of the word “inferred” here doesn’t make this an Inference question. There’s a big difference between looking for the choice that must be true based on the text and the task we’re presented with here—finding the choice that, if true, would weaken the argument. 19. (D) The important word in the stem is “recordings,” which directs us to ¶3 in general and lines 37-46 in particular. You’ll recall that this takes us to the first of two extended examples of what the author sees as a disturbing aspect of the early music movement, its tendency to separate the performance of music from the real life of a bygone day. The recordings in question feature an obtrusive piano thump-thumping the time (lines 40-42); that piano is nominally “accurate,” because it did exist in the 1700s, but the fact that 18th-century audiences barely heard it (lines 42-46) means that it is accurate in name only; the recordings’ sound itself is quite different from the 18th-century sound. The sense is that in this respect the movement is crossing itself up, or as (D) puts it, performing music most UNlike the way it sounded at the time of its composition. (A), (E) Both can be rejected out of hand because of their references to issues introduced later in ¶3: tempo and “intensity and excitement,” respectively.

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(B) seems to tie lines 4-8 together with ¶3, resulting in an extremely weird statement. Where does “betray the influence” come from, and where is the passage ever concerned with influences on the advocates of early music? Strange. (C) has it exactly backwards. By insisting on a instrument that was present in the 1700s and ending up with a sound that was not, the early music recordings are sacrificing “aesthetic integrity” for the sake of “historical authenticity.” • The harder you have to work to justify an answer choice, the more likely it is to be incorrect. Study the context of the detail in question, but don’t wander too far from it. (Many wrong answers do just that.) 20. (C) Again, as in Q. 19, remember that ¶3 explores the dichotomy between music and life. In life, says the final sentence, “our concepts of musical intensity and excitement have . . . changed,” which makes it ridiculous to insist on the original tempos of Mozart and Haydn symphonies, since those tempos were based on audience custom; and customs, as (C) points out, change. We applaud differently because our tastes have changed. Only (C) even remotely picks up on this. (A) refers back to the time-keeping piano earlier in ¶3. We’re way past that detail by the time audience applause is under discussion. (B), (D) Both do speak to changes in audiences—their altered expectations of musicians’ ability (B) and their greater appreciation of musical structure (D). But neither change is an issue mentioned or even alluded to in the passage; all the author focuses on is audience applause as a reflection of excitement and dash. (E) If so, then audiences today would likely applaud after those exciting early movements. But they don’t. (E) is another au-contraire choice, contradicting the sense of the passage. • Questions aren’t totally independent of each other. Use your work on one question to help you with others that seem to hinge on the same issue or the same part of the passage.

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Passage 4—U.S. Steel Industry (Q. 21-27) Topic and Scope: The U.S. steel industry; specifically, the characteristics and relative condition of the three major types of steel producers. Purpose and Main Idea: The author’s purpose is clearly announced in sentence 1: to show that some branches of the steel industry are doing better than others in these troubled economic times. To achieve that purpose, he needs to describe those branches and then explain the success of some and the weakness of others. And that’s just what our author does, carefully crafting his explanation as to why the minimills and specialty-steel mills are doing O.K. while the integrated producers are hurting. Paragraph Structure: The first sentence of ¶1, as we’ve just noted, announces the topic, scope, and purpose about as explicitly as any test-taker could wish. The rest of the ¶ names and describes the three branches of the industry. If you sensed that the branches’ differences would be crucial to the passage and hence to the questions, you may have taken a few seconds to make a quick list of what’s what, like so: INTEGRATED: process iron ore & coal/wide range of steel/big MINI: reprocess scrap steel/low-quality/limited range/cheap stuff/small SPECIALTY: small/use scrap steel/expensive products/own R&D dept ¶2 begins by setting the mini and specialty mills apart from the larger integrated mills— they’ve avoided the economic problems of the latter and some are even “quite profitable.” The ¶ then focuses on the advantages of the two smaller branches, one of which they share—a use of new technology. Furthermore, each has its own separate advantage, we’re told: Minimills produce only a few products (we heard that in ¶1) to be sold close to home, while specialty-steel mills are flexible to the customers’ needs. This information allows us to expand on the lists above in an effort to continue keeping track of the various characteristics of each type of mill. Having heard about how well the two smaller branches are doing—and keeping the opening sentence in mind—we’re eager to hear about the woes of integrated producers, and that’s just what ¶3 presents. Lines 29-32 are a laundry list of woes, but it seems that the big problem, outlined in lines 32-49, is an inefficiency inherent in the entire integrated production process, something that (lines 39-49) the U.S. companies share with other integrated producers around the world. After ¶3 has explored the weaknesses within integrated producers, ¶4 goes on to explicitly compare them to their smaller and more profitable brethren, and the discussion is detailed but not out of control. Note, for instance, that ¶4 begins by picking up on ¶3’s technology theme, highlighting the minimills’ and specialty mills’ technological efficiency. Note, too, that lines 57-63 simply repeat what we’ve already heard about minimills, that they sell a narrow range of cheap products close to home. That’s nothing new. Now it’s merely put to the service of the first sentence of ¶1, which is reinforced at the very end: The big guys are hurting; the little guys are doing relatively OK.

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The Big Picture: • When you’ve determined the author’s purpose, be sure to keep it in mind throughout. Here, it’s very easy to get lost in the morass of detail about steel production unless you keep remembering the initial point from sentence 1: the author’s desire to show that some branches of the steel industry are doing better than others. Having that in mind every step of the way keeps you focused right through line 65. • Many passages are based on some contrast or other. But some are so heavily based on contrast that your main job becomes getting the contrasts under control. Here, we have the basic differences among the three branches, as well as the more fundamental contrast between integrated producers (hurting) and the other two (doing well). Making lists of traits or terms associated with each mill type can help you manage the information much the way scratchwork helps in Logic Games. The Questions: 21. (C) (C) reflects the author’s stated purpose, the results of his investigation into the state of the U.S. steel industry, and the structure and content of that investigation. Its wording may seem detailed—but, then, so is the passage. And all of the wrong choices have profound problems: (A) alludes to a comparison between the U.S. and other nations that only occupies lines 3949, and even then it’s a comparison between integrated producers only. “Other nations” do not merit inclusion in a main idea discussion for this passage. (B) asserts an unwarranted distinction and then proceeds as if minimills were the whole story. (D) highlights the 19th century—again, merely a detail late in ¶3—and implies an historical overview when the author’s clear focus is on U.S. steel today. (E)’s misplaced focus on the future is as egregious as (D)’s focus on the past. (E) also errs by blurring the distinctions among the three branches of the industry. • A passage’s main idea can be expressed in many ways. Look for the one choice among the five that sums up the author’s topic, scope, and purpose, but don’t insist that your pre-phrasing match up exactly with what the testmakers give you.

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22. (A) Since four of the choices are true of minimills, it is likely that the right answer will instead be true of one of the other branches. Two effective tactics here: (1) using the passage (or your homemade lists) to locate minimill details, and throwing out choices that reflect them, or (2) seeking out a choice clearly associated with another branch but not with minimills (or, of course, one that has nothing to do with any branch). A clear contrast comes in lines 23-28, and that generates the correct answer: It’s the specialty mills that “preserve flexibility in their operations” (A), in contrast to the minimills’ “narrow range.” (B), (E) Lines 23-28 and 59-61 indicate the minimills’ focus on local sales (B) and limited product range (E). (C) Minimills work only with scrap (lines 11-14), and have dispensed of the iron-smelting process, “including the mining . . . of raw materials” (lines 52-56). (D) Like specialty mills, minimills “take advantage of new steel-refining technology” (lines 21-22). • Your two options in an EXCEPT question are to locate the “odd man out” directly, or reject the wrong answers in turn. Usually, a combination of the two techniques will yield the point. 23. (C) The reference to Japanese integrated producers at line 43 is preceded by “...but this cannot explain why,” signaling that the purpose of the reference must be to rebut some assertion or explanation. Indeed, lines 39-42 mention a conclusion that “one might” make, that old labor-intensive machinery is the reason for the financial weakness of the U.S. steel industry, but that conclusion won’t fly. If it were so, how come the Japanese companies, whose machinery is new and less labor-intensive, are also having financial woes? The Japanese situation shows, according to the author, that the weakness of the U.S. industry must not be due to the labor-intensive machinery. (C) explains that use to which the detail is put. (A) Au contraire, the Japanese and U.S. integrated producers have economic woes in common. (B) Au contraire, lines 46-49 confirm that ALL integrated producers share the same “common technological denominator”: inefficiency. (D) Hardly. See lines 46-49, “an inherently inefficient process” since the 19th century. (E) may be a true statement, but not one that the Japanese counterexample sheds any light on. • When a question makes a line reference, be sure to consider its entire context, not just its immediate context.

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24. (E) As we’ve seen, ¶3 outlines the problems plaguing integrated producers, after which one possible reason for poor performance (labor-intensive machinery) is rejected and another (inherent inefficiency) is proposed in its place. All of that is (E) in a nutshell. (A) ignores lines 29-39’s detailing of the troubles of integrated producers, and then mixes up what follows: If anything, first we get a hypothesis (i.e. a working theory) that’s criticized, followed by an opposing view that’s supported. (B) is just words. The author’s blaming the industry’s problems on inefficiency rather than machinery does not constitute the “resolution” of a “debate.” (C) A dilemma is an inherent contradiction. ¶3 points to no such paradox. (D) More words, ignoring lines 29-39 altogether. And there is no move from the specific to the general in ¶3. • Don’t just take words like “hypothesis” and “dilemma” at face value. Be sure you know what they mean, and factor in their meaning when considering answer choices such as these. Otherwise virtually all the choices will seem tempting. 25. (E) Your lists of details can be exceptionally useful in questions like this one. (So can a reminder that ¶s 1 and 4 are the main ¶s comparing the three branches of the steel industry; almost certainly one or both of those ¶s will yield Q. 25’s answer.) The fundamental difference between integrated producers on the one hand, and specialty-steel mills (ditto minimills) on the other hand, is that the former smelt iron ore and coal while the latter just work with scrap. Lines 50-57 spell out that both of the smaller branches “have dispensed almost entirely with” such “front-end” elements as (E)’s blast furnaces. (A), (D) Both are minimill details (lines 23-28). Specialty-steel mills retain flexibility. (B) Au contraire, lines 17-20 tell us that specialty-steel mills share relative economic health with the minimills. (C) distorts the example of the Japanese steel industry: The only Japanese counterparts mentioned in the passage are the integrated producers, discussed in ¶3. • If the answer to a question could come from two different ¶s—as in this case from ¶s 1 and 4—be sure to check both thoroughly. Do NOT go just for the first detail or choice that “looks good”!

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26. (A) An interesting question of the “analogy” or “parallel reasoning” type. Four of the choices face similar problems as integrated producers; we must find the odd man out. Your best tactic is to refresh your memory as to the problems of integrated producers, i.e. to reread ¶3, and then skim the choices for parallels. One way or another you should be left with (A). It seems as if the only problem that integrated producers are not faced with is a shortage of raw iron ore and coal. While everything else seems to be going wrong for the integrated mills, a lack of raw materials is never mentioned as a problem. (B) shares the problem of “excessive labor” costs (line 31). (C) describes the problem of heavy capital expenditures cited in line 31, and again in lines 50-54. (D) speaks to “manufacturing inflexibility” (line 32). (E) Old and “less automated” equipment is the problem here, as it is for the integrated producers in lines 32-34. • Remember that picking a wrong choice simultaneously means that you’re rejecting the right one. When reviewing your wrong choices, keep asking yourself why you rejected the credited choice. By doing so, you’ll be able to recognize bad habits that you can start to break. 27. (E) By this time, your familiarity with the problems facing integrated producers is probably keen enough that you can study each choice, in whatever order, and discern fairly readily which one best matches up with the author’s explanation for the condition of this segment of the steel industry: (A) has to do with a nation’s economic health, not that of one of its industries. (B) If integrated producers share a characteristic with the small and profitable specialtysteel mills, then that weakens any explanation about why the former are doing badly. (C) The Japanese integrated producers are also in trouble. If the ones in the U.S. mimicked their quality, reduced energy, and reduced labor, then matters might improve, but that’s not what we’re looking for here. The fact that they’re adopting the Japanese style doesn’t tie in with why they are currently in the condition the author describes. (D) speaks to efforts on the part of integrated producers to improve their lot; again, as with (C), that is outside the scope of the question of why they are down on their luck in the first place.

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(E) suggests that the “front-end” task of iron-smelting—in which we know integrated producers are engaged—is capital-intensive and unprofitable (lines 50-57), so much so that in other countries it requires government subsidy. This is solid evidence that, as the author alleges, iron smelting is indeed a drag on the integrated producers’ economic performance. • Strengthen/Weaken the Argument questions are more common in the LR sections than here in Reading Comp., but as we see from this question and Qs. 10 and 18 earlier, they do surface occasionally. Our task, just as in LR, is to consider each choice as true, and evaluate the effect it would have on the argument at hand. Also, we would expect such questions to contain the classic wrong answer types: ones that somehow fall outside the scope of the passage or the ¶ under consideration, or ones that do the opposite of what the question is looking for (like weakener (B) here). • Keep what you’re looking for firmly in mind. When looking for the choice that supports an argument of why things are bad, avoid choices (like (C) and (D) here) that posit what is being done because things are bad. Those are two completely different issues.

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SECTION II: LOGICAL REASONING

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1. (C) “Law without enforcement is not law.” So to the author, a necessary condition for real law must be “enforcement.” That’s not one of the answer choices per se, but the author goes on to define “enforcement” not just as announcing forbidden acts, but as punishing those acts, and “without favor.” This is what (C) is getting at: the author’s deeper definition of enforcement—that without which “real law” doesn’t exist. (A) lacks context. Our author would consider impartial and just use of power as a part of real law, but not its “arbitrary and unjust” use. So (A) leaves matters too vague. (B) Law that merely authorizes enforcement, without its being carried through, would fall short of the author’s definition of real law. (D) distorts the stimulus. The author sets out to specify when law is and is not “real,” and that’s independent of whether someone “understands law’s purpose.” (E) Sentence three makes it clear that real law “is not merely” (E)’s definition, but involves the punishment of violators as well. • It is often difficult to pre-phrase answers to Inference questions, unless the question explicitly asks for the author’s main point or conclusion. In that case a solid attempt at pre-phrasing can really pay off. 2. (A) “[T]he accumulating data”—the list of ailments suffered by runners, both newcomers and veterans—are the evidence that “suggest” the conclusion: The human body isn’t built to withstand jogging’s stresses. Well, the first sentence merely indicates a correlation that has been seen between jogging and the ailments. In other words, the fact that these ailments are “seemingly connected” to jogging tells us that joggers have these ailments, but not that jogging necessarily causes these ailments. However, to draw her conclusion, the author must believe that the connection is in fact causal, choice (A). If she didn’t so believe, she wouldn’t use this evidence to draw her categorical conclusion that the data suggest that the human frame is not built to withstand the rigors of jogging. (B), (D) Both bring up an unwarranted distinction between jogging and “other sports.” Whether these same ailments are or are not present in other sports is beside the point in an argument about the dangers of jogging only. (C) goes against the grain here—the author explicitly rules out differences between joggers’ experience levels as a factor in injuries. (E) “The human species” is way too broad—the scope here is limited to joggers. • Use Kaplan’s Denial Test to confirm whether you’ve identified an author’s necessary assumption. Remember how it works: if the answer is a correct assumption, its denial will contradict the text.

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• Make sure you’re clear on the difference between causation and correlation. Sometimes, as is the case here, an author will treat evidence that two things appear together (that is, a correlation) as evidence that one causes the other. Evidence of a true causal relationship must be very explicit, and here, we really have no hard evidence that jogging causes the ailments listed. 3. (D) Though this is nominally an Inference question, the stimulus has the sound of a paradox: There’s no conclusion per se, just two facts connected by a “however.” First we learn how the Pitcombe students label themselves politically (and notice that the percents—25% conservative, 24% liberal, 51% middle of road—add up to 100%, so everyone’s covered). Yet a whopping 77% of the group hold a liberal position on a certain set of issues. Well, we’d expect self-proclaimed liberals to do so, but even if every single Pitcombe liberal plus every single middle-of-the-roader held the liberal position, that would only account for 75% of the students; the remaining 2% would have to come out of the conservative wing. So (D) has to be true: At least some conservatives must hold that liberal position. Otherwise the 77% figure could not be achieved. (A) As we’ve just seen, IF all self-described liberals and middles hold the liberal position, then some conservatives must. And if some of the liberals and middles do NOT hold that position, then that just means that more conservatives must hold it. So (A) is by no means necessarily true; the math doesn’t require it. (B), (C) It’s not clear whether “not endorsing” a position is the same as opposing it, but either way, (B) and (C) cannot be inferred. If you assumed that “not endorsing” means opposing, then you may have concluded that (B) is possible only, while (C) is impossible. (E) Just as “opposition” is technically never mentioned, so is “a conservative position” never mentioned. And after all, even if some liberals do not hold the liberal view, it needn’t be true that some of them support a conservative stance. • When an argument throws numbers—especially percents—at you, do some quick arithmetic and see how (and whether) all the data jibe. Often the question will hinge on an overlap between groups, either one the author has failed to see or, as here in Q. 3, one that has to exist. 4. (E) Perusing the stem first confirms that while Victor is trying to rebut Lenore, he does so badly—and we have to identify the weakness. Lenore’s point is the virtual impossibility of writing history objectively, her evidence the inevitable personal bias of historians. A proper rebuttal would attack that “inevitability,” or mention some unbiased historians by name, or point out other factors that might minimize bias. Instead, Victor simply says “Hey, some bias and biased people have been detected; therefore, those ‘detectives’ at least must be objective.” Hello? Cannot a biased individual perceive someone else’s bias? Sure he can: Such a person might be skilled at detecting the biases in others yet not be aware of his own. Identifying someone else’s bias is not, then, proof of one’s objectivity, and Victor’s rebuttal fails because of (E).

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(A) Two problems. First, Lenore is not attacking bias, as (A) would have it; she is arguing for its inevitability. Second, yes, Victor’s logic is faulty, but he isn’t necessarily biased himself. (B) Since Victor isn’t arguing that ALL historians are unbiased, he needn’t address any exceptions to that generalization. What he needs to do is prove that some historians are not biased; and as we’ve seen, he falls short in that effort. (C) To rebut Lenore he doesn’t have to provide chapter-and-verse documentation about the bias that’s been found. He must confirm the objectivity of the “detectives.” (D) Victor’s argument doesn’t rely on rejecting a catalog of biases, just on proving whether the detectors of bias are themselves bias-free. Which, of course, it fails to do. • When you’re asked to identify an argument’s flaw, sometimes thinking about what might make the argument sound can lead you to the flaw at hand. Here in Q. 4, for instance, considering the kind of effective rebuttal that Victor could construct may help you see where his effort fails. 5. (B) Why must the thieves have entered through the basement (i.e. below ground level)? Because the security guard says they didn’t come in on ground level or above. That is different from evidence proving that alternative means of entrance were not used. The essence of the logic is a flatly factual statement of a phenomenon that must have occurred, but a statement that is based on a subjective assessment that dismisses other alternatives. That describes (B) pretty well, as well as the stimulus, doesn’t it? The competitors’ “claim” about what cannot have happened is used to support a flat assertion about what must have happened. (A), (E) The evidence in each choice is factual (the results of the judging in (A), and (E)’s statement about the late filers). But the stimulus evidence is a claim that some party is making, and an argument that lacks that element cannot be parallel to the original. (C) The conditional “If the census is to be believed” has no parallel in the stimulus, nor does the movement from small groups (married men vs. married women) to large (all men vs. all women). (D) is, yes, based on a claim that isn’t factually proven. But we are looking for a claim that something could not have occurred as evidence for a conclusion about what must be the case. So the evidence in (D) falls short, and the conclusion that the product is safe for other creatures isn’t like the stimulus conclusion either. • When you can’t symbolize the terms of a Parallel Reasoning stimulus algebraically, step back from the content to characterize the nature of the argument under analysis (as we do, above, in the sentence beginning “The essence of the logic...”). Then you can compare its nature to that of the choices, rejecting the ones that deviate as you move swiftly to discovering the truly parallel choice.

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6. (C) The structure couldn’t be laid out more clearly: High-tech medicine is driving costs up (conclusion); the cataract example “illustrate[s] why” (evidence). The example goes on to indicate that now that technology has made the surgery easier and cheaper, more and more people are having it done, thus driving up the total cost. “Hang on a second, back up,” you might have said to yourself. “Didn’t the author just say that cataract surgery is cheaper now?” Indeed he did, and yet he concludes that total costs are up. It has to be true, then, as (C) says, that whatever money is saved due to the lower price of the procedure is offset by the increased number of patients opting for the surgery. (A) That the surgery was “not always effective” 10 years ago is a far cry from saying that “few” surgeries were effective. For all we know, there were still many effective surgeries back then, even though the surgery is more effective today. (B)’s scope is the future—what is “likely to” happen in the long run—but that cannot be inferred from this argument set in the past and present. (D) We are explicitly told that what is driving up costs is not the elderly’s demand for surgery, but high-tech medicine. Cataract surgery—admittedly an ailment of the elderly— is used as an example, not identified as the main culprit. (E) seems to run counter to the fifth sentence: the passage explicitly indicates that the surgery is cheaper now, which strongly suggests that it’s more affordable now than it was ten years ago. • Be on the lookout at all times for “au-contraire” choices—those that are the opposite of what the author believes or what the question is looking for. 7. (E) Four of the choices weaken the explanation of why so many more people are having their cataracts done; therefore the right answer must either strengthen it, or be outside the scope. And remember what that explanation is: they’re going for the surgery, says our author, because the technology makes it less painful, more successful, and cheaper. There’s really no way to pre-phrase here—we simply have to check the choices, looking for the one that either strengthens the argument, or is irrelevant to it. (A) asserts that there are more people now. More people could lead, in general, to more people needing or wanting surgery, which on its face could explain the increase. (B) strongly suggests that the prevalence of the disease may have increased. An increased need for cataract surgery would certainly explain an increase in its incidence. (C) asserts that there are more elderly now, and the author admits that elderly people are prone to cataracts. As with (A), this change in the demographics would suggest another reason besides improved technology for the increase in surgeries.

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(D) The fact that more people don’t have to pay for the procedure could also reasonably account for an increased number of people opting for it. This, too, would therefore challenge the author’s argument that the increase in cataract operations is due to the benefits conferred by the new technology. (E) is too vague to challenge the author’s explanation. Are these unlucky patients victims of the new technology or the old? We simply don’t know. Since (E) doesn’t differentiate between unsuccessful surgery then and now, and doesn’t even tell us what percentage of surgeries fail, we have to consider the consequences of unsuccessful surgery in general to be irrelevant to the specific line of reasoning here. (E)’s therefore the one we want. • Study each Logical Reasoning stem carefully, before reading the stimulus. Often the stem will give you clues as to what to read for, and sometimes (as here) even do part of your work for you. Q. 7’s stem tells us the author’s purpose (to explain) and an aspect of the scope (increased cataract operations). This gives us a head start on analyzing the argument. 8. (A) The paradox, simply put, is that employers don’t want to hire workers who once served under non-compete agreements, even though the courts have pretty much ruled that these promises not to work for a competitor aren’t binding. There must be something about the process that new employers find off-putting . . . and (A) describes it: the costs and bad publicity of going through a lawsuit, even one that (the author implies) the new employer is likely to win. (A) would explain the new hirer’s reluctance. (B), if anything, would deepen the paradox, by narrowing the applicant pool to competitors’ employees, making it even more puzzling that firms would balk at hiring them. (C)’s focus is on the old employer, the one who imposes the non-compete agreements. But the paradox has to do with the new hirer. (D), like (C), has its focus on the wrong parties. That most current employees are loath to go to a competitor is irrelevant to the issue of those (whatever their number) who do want to switch firms, but can’t because of the new firm’s qualms. (E) suggests that firms would be eager to hire employees who have established relationships with clients while working at other companies, which doesn’t explain why companies would be hesitant to hire employees bound by non-complete agreements when they know those agreements aren’t binding. • Once you’ve restated the paradox, think about alternative possibilities that the author may not have considered. Doing so is often the fast track to the right answer in a Paradox question.

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9. (C) Both women are concerned with how to make a country admirable. Inez’s point—in contrast to Mary Ann’s point that what matters is that a country be strong—is that a country be moral. The evidence? If its actions are moral, then it is admirable—and she points out that countries can be strong but most UNadmirable indeed. All of this presupposes that a country’s moral compass can be evaluated—or, as (C) puts it, that one can assign moral value to countries’ actions. If (C) is false, if morality is not a scale on which countries can be weighed, then Inez’s argument for judging countries on a moral basis is blown away. (A) Inez’s argument is conditional: If a country is morally good, then it’s admirable. Does there have to be even one country that meets Inez’s standard? No. For all we know, every country falls short, but this wouldn’t alter Inez’s argument, so (A) need not be assumed. (B) Inez doesn’t deny that a country can be both strong and moral; her counterexamples merely indicate that strength is not a necessary condition of admirableness, so her argument does not rely on (B). (D) Citizens’ beliefs are never mentioned by Inez, so she needn’t be assuming anything about them. (E) merges the issues of morality and strength together in an ominous assertion that the morally good country had better use its strength to get other countries to shape up, or else. This is a far cry from Inez’s rather idealistic, even genteel point of view; her argument surely doesn’t presuppose this. • Be on the lookout for the classic wrong answer types. Citizens’ beliefs (D) are outside the scope, and therefore can have nothing to do with the necessary presupposition here. Similarly, (E) confounds the whole issue by altering the argument from individuals assessing the morality of a country to countries imposing their moralities on others—”by whatever means necessary,” no less! It’s distorted, it’s extreme; it can’t be the assumption here. 10. (E) Something’s not right. All of John’s friends say they know a really healthy 40-year smoker (that’s what they claim to be true), but John doesn’t know one, and “he is not unique among his friends in this respect.” That quoted phrase—a statement of fact—means that at least one of them does not know such a smoker. Since they all claim they do, at least one of John’s friends is not telling the truth. That’s (E). (A) The proven liars are among John’s friends, who may or may not smoke themselves. (B) Intent isn’t the issue, nor is exaggeration. The issue is the contradiction between what John’s friends profess to be true, and what is true. (C) For all we know, each of John’s friends who professes to know a really healthy 40-year smoker is talking about a different smoker! They don’t all have to be referring to the same one.

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(D) “Most” is what kills this one. It only need be true that one of John’s friends is lying. • The LSAT tests your ability to interpret words and phrases correctly. “Not unique...in this respect” means that there are some who are like him in this respect— that is, some who also don’t know a healthy 40-year smoker. This paraphrase of the text is the key to getting the point. • “Some” literally means “at least one.” That’s all it can be inferred to mean. 11. (B) “. . . [I]t is imperative that . . . ,” “must be able to . . . ,” “is . . . unable to . . . ”: Phrases like these are sending you a signal that the author’s main interest is in necessary conditions— conditions that are required for some result to occur. Sentence 1 says that a necessary condition of democracy’s survival is the average citizen’s informed opinions, and sentence 2 narrows that to focus on opinions about science. Sentence 3 comes along to assert that in the face of today’s scientific developments, the average Joe or Jane cannot absorb enough info to hold such informed opinions. But, as we’ve already seen, without such opinions, democracy can’t survive; so it has to be true, as (B) has it, that today’s scientific developments threaten democracy. (A) The author never mentions scientists, so we cannot infer from her remarks that they have the responsibility to attack the problem. For all we know, other groups such as science writers or educators can help the public form meaningful scientific opinions. (C) Democracy’s survival requires that the average Joe or Jane, not that every Joe or Jane, hold informed opinions on science. Also, the phrase “scientifically literate” isn’t used in the stimulus, so we can’t be sure that it applies. (D) is a classic extreme choice, in that it blows things way out of proportion. The stimulus implies that extremely advanced scientific knowledge threatens democracy, not, as (D) would have it, that any scientific knowledge is bad for democracy. The notion that science may be getting a little difficult for the average citizen to comprehend doesn’t lead to the notion that the least scientific knowledge would yield the best democracy. (E) tests necessity/sufficiency confusion in a classic way. Citizens having informed opinions on science are necessary for democracy’s survival but aren’t necessarily sufficient for it. In other words, democracy could be destroyed (for other reasons) even if every single citizen becomes scientifically informed and opinionated. • When a condition necessary for a result does not occur, the result cannot occur. Keep this principle in mind, as it is at the heart of most LR questions that hinge on necessity.

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12. (E) “However” signals where the “discrepancy” that we are to resolve is to be found. The topic is the use of the fossil record near a former glacier to date the appearance of a warm climate, and here’s the apparent paradox: While the insect record suggests that right after the glacier melted, a warm climate appeared, the pollen record in the same area suggests that the warm climate came much, much later. (E) does nothing to explain this difference in dates: beetles may be older than “many” plants, but there could be plenty of other pollenbearing plants that are as old or that even predate the beetles. (E) is therefore irrelevant to the seeming contradiction in the stimulus, and is thus the choice we seek that does not help to explain the discrepancy. The four wrong choices all paper over the dating discrepancy in different yet valid ways: (A)’s solution is that the fossils were cold-weather beetles, who returned to the area while the climate was still cold. End of discrepancy: The pollen record now reigns uncriticized. (B) explains how plants might take longer to appear in a warm area, and thus suggests why the plant fossil record might give the impression that the warming occurred later than it actually did. (C) Since (C) shows how beetles could survive in a barren post-glacial area before the arrival of plants, it explains why the beetle fossils antedate the plant fossils. (D) indicates that the plant record may not accurately reflect the real date of new plant growth following the melting of the glacier, which suggests that the pollen record may not necessarily accurately reflect the onset of the warm period. If this is true, the discrepancy in the fossil record is no longer surprising. • In a “discrepancy” or “paradox” question, be sure to paraphrase the paradox in simple terms in your head before you plunge into the answer choices. • Previewing the stem can help you in many different ways. In the case of this EXCEPT question, the stem tells you that the answer you seek is the one that’s not relevant to the discrepancy in question, or the one that in fact even deepens the mystery. 13. (E) The paragraph lays out a chain of cause and effect that begins with the overall point made in the first sentence: Using these new “clean-coal” technologies in factories could reduce pollutants and acid rain. How? By cutting a lot of noxious emissions (sentence 2), which in turn would reduce noxious ozone production in the troposphere (sentence 3). You don’t have to understand what all of this technical terminology means; you simply have to see that in the author’s mind, the factory technology strategy mentioned in sentence 1 could lead to a reduction of tropospheric ozone in sentence three, choice (E). Put another way: If one thing (new tech in factories) could lead to another (reduced emissions), and the second (reduced emissions) does lead to a third (reduction in noxious ozone), then it’s fair to say that the first could lead to the third.

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(A) The author is way too vague on which of the pollutants contributes to acid rain for (A) to be a valid inference. For all we know, sulfur dioxide has little or no impact on the acid rain phenomenon. (B) Nitrogen pollutants are all that affects noxious ozone formation, as far as this passage is concerned; sulfur dioxide may have little or no role. (And anyway, it says that noxious ozone is formed in the troposphere—don’t think there are too many factories there.) (C) distorts the statistic that these new technologies could cut sulfur dioxide emissions by 80%. For all we know, even one per cent of sulfur dioxide is unsafe. (D) The concept of “careful design” is never raised here, and is so vague that it cannot be part of a proper inference. More importantly, (D) is about designing new factories, while the stimulus is about reconfiguring existing ones. • In Inference questions, be on the lookout for terms (like (D)’s “careful design”) that have no bearing on the text. Such choices are invariably wrong. (See also (B) and (C) in Q. 18, below.) 14. (D) There are lots of characters here, so make sure you keep them straight. First, there’s Joshua Smith, who wrote a book. Then there’s a book editor who criticizes the book as “implausible.” Finally, there’s the author of the stimulus, who criticizes the editor’s criticism, stating that it is “unwarranted.” Got all that? Now, on what grounds does the stimulus author feel the editor’s criticism of the book is off base? Each of the incidents in the novel “could very well have happened”—in other words, each incident is “plausible.” But just because the individual events ring true doesn’t mean that they will do likewise when strung together. The author is committing what is sometimes called the “part to whole” fallacy, the assumption that that which is true of the parts must be true of the whole. (D) states the flaw; the “given characteristic” mentioned is “plausibility.” (A) and (C) both key off the sideswipe at the editor in sentence 2, but that catty reference to the editor’s previous off-base criticisms is just background information, not central to the author’s rebuttal. (Note that that entire phrase could be dropped from the paragraph with no damage to the logic.) (B) criticizes the author for relying on people’s judgment concerning whether an individual incident is plausible. Granted, we might be mistaken concerning what is plausible. But the fact remains that even if each event in the book is plausible by itself, the book as a whole could be implausible. So (B) fails to address the central issue here. (E) The evidence isn’t necessarily relevant only to those who already believe the conclusion. One could accept the evidence that each of the novel’s incidents is plausible, yet reject the conclusion that the entire novel is likewise. • Use Kaplan’s PrepTest explanations to learn about the various types of faulty logic perennially tested on the LSAT. Take careful notes on them all. For another example of part:whole weakness, see Section III, Q. 4.

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15. (C) The conclusion is that the skills needed for creative research are teachable and learnable, but not a single word in the evidence directly mentions skills or creative research. All we’re told is that Thomson taught tons of physicists of great distinction, so two key assumptions are at work here. First, the author must assume that Thomson’s distinguished students do, in fact, have creative research skills—but this isn’t listed as an answer choice. Second, she must assume that at least some of those distinguished students lacked creative research skills before they met up with Thomson. After all, if they were all fully creative researchers beforehand, then Thomson’s influence wouldn’t support the conclusion, would it? That second assumption is what we get in (C). (A) The argument could work even if (A) were false, even if Thomson were relatively unknown and all his students came out of his own home town. Thus the Kaplan Denial Test proves that (A) isn’t a necessary assumption. (B) needn’t be assumed, because even if Thomson taught some people who were never recognized for any accomplishment, the author still has the eminent students to support her argument. (D) “Other fields” have no role in this argument. (D) raises an unwarranted comparison between other fields and physics, and the validity of the argument does not depend on any such comparison. (E) isn’t a necessary assumption either, because Thomson’s successful students may be rare exceptions. The author’s point is that creative research skills can be taught, and the possibility that few successful researchers are taught by renowned scholars (the denial of (E)) doesn’t hinder that argument. • Be watchful for terms mentioned in the conclusion that are absent from the evidence (such as “skills” and “creative research” here). Recognizing such scope shifts is often the key to spotting the author’s necessary assumption or nailing down the argument’s logical flaw. 16. (E) Only the phrase “explanation of the difference described” marks this as a Paradox question, but that’s enough; we are indeed asked to find a choice that resolves an apparent contradiction contained in the argument. We are told of a seemingly inconsistent use of water power by the Romans: extensive in the boonies, none at all around the cities. That sure sounds odd, yes? But a pre-phrase is certainly possible here: We can search for an choice that speaks to city conditions that would somehow render water power unnecessary or even detrimental, and the latter is what (E) provides. The possibly inflammatory effect of introducing water power in and around cities (social unrest) would certainly argue against its use, and does help us to better understand the situation described in the stimulus. (A) is evidence of Roman water expertise (which the author grants in the first sentence) but fails to address why such water use would stop at the city limits.

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(B) just says that in the cities, water was available all year round with some “seasonal variation.” But so what? If anything that would deepen the paradox, making it even more puzzling that all that available water wasn’t used by the Romans to make energy. (C) is a wash: “Water power was vulnerable, but damage from sabotage could be readily fixed.” That’s all well and good—but we’re right back where we started: Why wasn’t it used in and around cities? (D) It would stand to reason that areas not using water power would have some energy source. But that still doesn’t answer the question “why not use water power in the cities when it’s used in the more outlying regions?” All of the wrong choices leave this central question unanswered, while (E) provides a satisfactory explanation. • Read unfamiliar question stems carefully, so that you can recognize familiar question types that are somehow “in disguise.” Recognizing this one as essentially a Paradox question helps us to discard the choices that have no bearing on the surprising circumstance. 17. (B) The stem is a little confusing and requires careful interpreting: It means “On what grounds does the reviewer criticize the book she is reviewing?” Well, she does two things: object to one of the three alleged energy storage methods (electricity), and claim that at least three others have been left out. That means the book is guilty of sins of both commission and omission—which is more or less (B) in a nutshell: One of the methods, electricity, is wrong (inaccurate), and others have been left out (the list is not exhaustive). (A) distorts the main issue, which is not “Which storage method is most ‘basic’?” but is rather “What are the basic storage methods?” (C) The use of energy is (C)’s concern, but not that of the book under review nor the reviewer herself. (D), (E) The effectiveness of energy storage methods is wholly outside the scope. Note (E)’s two additional problems: (E), like (A), seems to believe that the issue is “Which method is most basic?”; and (E) creates an unwarranted distinction between electricity and the others. • Many wrong choices deviate from the scope—a healthy reminder to keep the author’s scope in mind throughout your reading of each stimulus and set of choices.

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18. (E) Previewing the stem, we see that we need to discern the author’s main point. When the author begins by saying that something “is no mystery,” it’s a good bet that his point will be the mystery’s solution, and so it is here. Those unfamiliar with the term “figurative painting” must figure out that it means “recognizable images,” and you can do so by combining the first two sentences. The author figures that in the 1970s, people wanted to empathize with paintings, and puzzling over abstract art didn’t afford this opportunity; he equates “lack of realism” with abstraction in the final sentence, and asserts that abstract art left people alienated. So what explains the revival of figurative art in the 70’s? Evidently, the author believes the public’s taste is the solution to the mystery, choice (E). (A) Quite the contrary: if abstract art did reflect reality, by the author’s own logic people might have been drawn to it. His whole point is that abstract art is divorced from reality— which may help explain why the 70’s public resented it. (B) is a little vague—technically, the idea of “traditionalism” is not mentioned at all. But even if we interpret “traditional” to mean the recognizable realistic paintings the author believes that people prefer to abstract paintings, one would have to conclude from the argument that people wanted to see such subjects portrayed in traditional ways, not nontraditional ways as (B) would have it. (C) The argument is about what the art-viewing public wants to see, and why; not which form of art is more difficult to create. Talent plays no part in the argument, which is why (C) is far from the author’s main point. (D) The passage doesn’t lead us to believe that the public can’t understand the theoretical basis of abstract art. It’s just that, in the 1970s, they didn’t want to. They wanted an art closer to home. • A “main point” or “conclusion” question works like any other inference: It must be true based on the text. 19. (E) The argument we are to weaken is that the high wages paid to Valitanian (where do they get these names?) elected officials have corrupted them. The evidence for this charge: Why, simply that high wages always attract corrupt individuals, those most interested in lining their pockets. To the author, that is a truism, but she provides no real evidence against these Valitanian elected officials. Therefore, we can weaken the indictment against them if we can somehow show them to be above petty financial matters. And that’s just what (E) does. If (E) is true—if most of these officials could make more money elsewhere—then the cord between this evidence and this conclusion is severed; the officials may still be corrupt, but not for the reason proposed. In the face of (E), the author would have to come up with alternative evidence for the conclusion; and that is proof positive that (E) has weakened the argument.

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(A) Spending one’s own cash in the hopes of cashing in big upon election might be considered a reasonable investment, even for the corrupt money-hungry politicians portrayed by the author. Nothing in (A) weakens the argument; candidates could spend some of their own money on their campaigns and still be mostly in politics for the high salaries. (B) Term length being unmentioned in the argument, we cannot conclude what effect, if any, a four-year term would have on officials’ integrity. (C) The argument is about whether money attracts worse candidates, not more candidates. Their number is irrelevant. (D) may well describe most of Valitania’s politicians, in which case it provides some support for the conclusion. • Study this argument, choice (E), and explanation carefully. Together they provide an excellent textbook example of what it means to weaken an argument. 20. (C) This adviser has an interesting and unusual take on freedom of speech: It’s not just right, it’s smart. How so? Because keeping ideas silent benefits no one, while airing ideas encourages the good ones and reveals the bad ones so that they can be rebutted. A prephrased answer to “What’s the method?” should demand a choice that combines these two rationales—morality and practicality—and that line of thought must lead one to (C). (A) Circularity means that the conclusion is merely assumed to be true; in other words, that the evidence and conclusion are functionally identical. Not so here: The author provides independent evidence (sentences 2 and 3) for the conclusion (sentence 1). (B) Au contraire, the author goes beyond the “right” of free speech to its wisdom and practicality. (D) Based on the last sentence, the author evidently takes for granted that the truth can readily be suppressed, by force. (He just doesn’t think that doing so is smart.) (E) By saying that free speech is a government’s “only rational policy,” the author is explicitly dwelling in the real, not the ideal. And the negative outlook of this choice (cannot be achieved) doesn’t match the tone of the argument. • Notice that the stem here tells you the author’s purpose before you even read the paragraph. That makes your reading job easier. Get in the habit of analyzing each stem first!

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21. (D) The evidence is that under free speech, good ideas blossom and bad ideas reveal themselves, thus making them easier to shoot down. A “smart” government will allow free speech in order to protect itself against danger and promote order for all. Look for a choice that speaks to these issues, and you’re likely to latch onto (D) quickly. If true freedom of speech reduces the risk of revolution, wouldn’t a government be smart, as the author contends, to adopt it? (A) That most would tolerate limits on free speech doesn’t ensure that a small but angry minority might not cause big, big trouble. Besides, if anything, (A) seems to run counter to the spirit of the argument: The author wants the government to adopt freedom of speech, while (A) offers a possible reason why the government might get away with curtailing it to some extent. (B) distorts the issue of “rationality”: The author feels that adopting free speech is the rational thing to do, but the rationality or irrationality of the government’s response to dangerous ideas is one step removed from the argument. We can guess that this author would probably hold that a rational response to dangerous ideas is more likely when speech is free...but that’s another argument for another day. (C) Since the author never argues that free speech is the only, or the most important, freedom for a government and a people, (C) neither strengthens nor weakens his logic. Other basic rights are outside the scope of the argument. (E) is one argument for the irrelevancy of free speech. Au contraire! • Sometimes the second question of a two-parter is the easier of the two. Here, the abstract choices of Q. 20 suggests that this may be the case, and you may have benefited from jumping right to Q. 21 first. It’s okay to handle one while putting the other off for later. 22. (D) We’re asked, What’s the flaw in the plan?, so we had better understand its goal before studying its specifics. The drama workshop wants (says the last sentence) to offer scholarships only to those with the best-rated auditions. To achieve this, they’ll endow the top 10% of locals and the top 10% of nonlocals with scholarships. Whoa!, you should say to yourself—a scope shift! The breakdown of auditioners into local/nonlocal has nothing to do with audition quality, and hence the two criteria could possibly clash. For instance, what if the local talent is so far superior to that of the nonlocals that the auditions of the second 10% of locals (the ones right below the 10% who will get scholarships) get higher ratings than any of the top nonlocal talent? It’s possible, right? And if it happens, then the workshop will be undercutting its stated goal, because some people with worse ratings (the nonlocals) will get scholarships over better rated auditioners. (D) has its finger on the scope shift. (A) The terms of the plan are: talent, local vs. nonlocal applicants, and scholarship offers. (A) mentions none of these, in favor of: enrollment, other programs, and admission applications. So (A) is outside the scope for many reasons.

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(B)’s reminder of the subjectivity and hence fragility of drama auditions doesn’t take away from the plan’s effectiveness, because all of the auditioners will be equally prey to the possibly inaccurate results. The plan concerns what will happen when all the evaluations, accurate or otherwise, are in. (C) is a variation on the “can vs. should” scope shift. Someone’s need (or lack of need) for financial aid has nothing to do with the wisdom of offering that person aid. This is the scope shift that (C) commits, however, and not the one that the author commits. (E) Fairness-schmairness. The issue is why the workshop may be cutting its own throat in its plan to offer scholarships to the best-rated auditioners. Fair or unfair, only (D) explains why the plan may not work. In any case, who says that the plan favors nonlocals? For all we know, the plan may result in fewer nonlocals being offered scholarships. • Watch out for authors’ shifting the scope from the terms of their evidence to those of their conclusion. But don’t pick answer choices that shift the scope! 23. (E) We’re asked for an inference, so let’s see how the argument is constructed. The argument proceeds from general comments about the author’s criteria for novels to a specific claim that Peter Lee’s San Francisco novel “passes [her] test.” Sentences 1 and 3 make it clear that it is a necessary condition of her full enjoyment that the novel earn her trust by the author’s knowing a city “at least as well as [she does].” Thus, since Lee’s novel passes her test, it would have to be true that, in the opinion of the reviewer, Lee does know San Francisco at least as well as she does; and (E) just restates that. (A) The reviewer’s enjoyment of a good novel is increased by her trust. We can’t infer from this that she enjoys any novel whose author she trusts. (B) essentially reverses the terms in sentence 3—something we are not allowed to do. The reviewer might well trust novels that are set in unfamiliar locales. The logic here starts from a conditional statement: “When I read a novel set in a city I know well...” We therefore don’t know what it takes to gain the reviewer’s trust in all other cases—it’s very possible that she trusts a novelist whose book is set in a city alien to her, so (B) cannot be inferred. (C) All we can infer about Lee’s first novel is that—since it, too, passed the reviewer’s test—it was set in a city the reviewer knew well, and Lee’s knowledge of it at least matched her own. But that city may or may not have been S.F. (D) As we saw above in (B), we don’t know how the reviewer feels about books set in cities unknown to her. • Remember that the answer to an Inference question must have a high truth threshold—it MUST be true based on the text. Accept nothing less.

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• The word “when,” like “if,” sets up a conditional statement, which means that everything that follows is based strictly and only on the particular state of affairs designated by the conditional. Here, everything follows from a novel in question being set in a city the reviewer knows well. How does the reviewer respond to novels set in cities she doesn’t know well? We can’t possibly know, which is why (B) and (D) fail as proper inferences. 24. (C) We’re given a principle of conduct, and asked for the real-life scenario that best matches up to it. The issue is, “When is it morally justified to benefit from harming someone else?” And the principle cites a two-part necessary condition, signaled as usual by “only if”: the victim’s awareness that the behavior could be harmful, and his/her consent. We must see that in the absence of such awareness and/or consent, the benefits accruing from the harm will not be morally justified. Having done that analysis, we can then proceed with confidence to the choices and see how they stack up: (A) ignores the whole issue of awareness and consent, focusing instead on issues (false statements; preventing harm) that the principle never mentions. Besides, Sonia attempts to benefit, but does not—she gets stuck in detention anyway—so the morality test doesn’t apply here; no one here benefits from harming another. (B) brings in the concept of accidental behavior, and again ignores the awareness and consent issues. (C) Here ya go. Max lacked awareness of the potential harm of the experimental drug. Thus a necessary condition for the moral justification in Wesley’s using the results is lacking. He harmed Max without informing Max of the risks. Thus, according to the principle, it is not morally justified for Wesley to benefit from the harm he inflicted on Max, and so the judgment in (C) is right on the money. For the record: (D) Roger’s mother consented to the operation, and the wording seems to suggest that, as a doctor, she’d be aware of the risks. Since this situation meets the two criteria for moral justification, we cannot use the principle at hand to conclude that Roger was morally wrong to benefit from the transplant. (E) argues that taking the profits from James is unjustifiable, but that can’t be correct here: James is the one trying to benefit from having done harm, and the principle in the stimulus certainly wouldn’t support it in this case (who, after all, consents to being defrauded?). Denying James the profits would be in line with the principle in the stimulus, but (E) says that denying James is UNjustifiable, which conflicts with the principle. • Principle questions usually present a real-life situation and ask us to pick the one abstract principle, out of five, that applies. Q. 24 reverses this. But the approach is the same: Think topic and scope. Look for the one and only choice that matches up well in all particulars; toss out choices that enter new territory.

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25. (C) Because of its stem’s wordiness and the formality of all the prose, this question seems tougher than it actually is. The stem, first of all, alerts us that it’s Parallel Reasoning, and that what we’ll be looking at is (1) a government’s policy, (2) that policy’s intent, and (3) some relevant circumstance. All we need to do is match up the stimulus’ (1), (2), and (3) with those of the right answer. In the stimulus, (1) is farm subsidies, (2) is the goal of bolstering domestic yield, and (3) is the effect of that policy: more intensive farming that exhausts the soil and hurts domestic yield. In short, then, we want a self-defeating policy: a policy that goes after one goal but in the end achieves the exact opposite. That’s what we need to look for among the choices: (A) would work better if the policy of subsidizing theaters to enhance tourism actually repelled tourists. But all (A) is saying is that theater is largely irrelevant to tourists’ purchase decision. (B) would work better if the policy of restricting imports to keep domestic producers alive actually drove them into bankruptcy! Instead, (B)’s policy works even better than planned: It doesn’t just keep the domestic producers alive, but helps them rack up big profits. (C)’s policy of building a strong army to avoid armed conflict actually brings about armed conflict, which is needed to keep the army strong in the first place. This is the self-defeating policy we need—a policy that aims for one thing but brings about its opposite. For the record: (D) would work better if the policy of reducing taxes to stimulate investment actually killed investment. But (D) just goes on to say that the chancy nature of investment—a totally outside issue—may affect things. Not parallel. (E) comes so close, with a policy (traffic laws), an intent (safer travel), and the opposite effect achieved (less safety). Where (E) goes wrong is that it’s not the policy that brings about the opposite result, but the outside factor of population growth that increases traffic volume. (E) misses the major element present in the stimulus and in (C): a policy that’s designed to bring about a result but that directly brings about its opposite. Here, we do have the opposite of an intended result, but the policy itself is not to blame, so we cannot label the policy “self-defeating.” • Don’t be deterred by a lengthy question stem: If you take the time to take it apart, it can tell you a lot about what you’re looking for and make your job much easier. • In non-algebraic Parallel Reasoning questions, abstract from the text and try to paraphrase the general structure as simply as possible. In a case like this, don’t throw in words like “farming,” “subsidies,” and “soil exhaustion”—these are the particulars, and the right answer won’t be about these things. But “self-defeating policy” is perfect—it describes in a general way the gist, the action of the stimulus, and the very thing we are to look for in the right answer.

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SECTION III: LOGICAL REASONING

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1. (A) According to the first sentence, a condition necessary for a flower to be worth growing in a garden is that it smell sweet. Some roses, we’re told, have no scent at all, sweet or otherwise; they, like all roses, provide stunning color, but are scentless. All in all, then, there must be some flowers—namely the scentless roses—that provide stunning color but aren’t worth growing. That’s just what (A) says. (B) The only scentless flowers mentioned are “some roses.” Other types of flowers might be both scentless and visually drab. (C) contradicts the passage’s necessary condition. Only flowers that smell sweet are worth growing in a garden, so there can be no flowers worth growing that are scentless. (D) is possible only: It’s possible that some sweet-scented roses might still not be worth growing in a garden. But it’s equally possible that all sweet-smelling flowers, roses or otherwise, are worth growing. No way to tell. (E) Nothing in the stimulus makes stunning color a requirement for cultivation in a garden. • The word “only” should always grab your attention. It signifies the always-tested, always-important concept of necessary conditions. 2. (B) The conclusion—signaled by the phrase “That this is true is shown by”—is an assertion of cause and effect: Using money causes a decline in a civilization. But the evidence all amounts to correlation only: When money (of either type, real or paper) was used, Western civilization declined. A counterexample will suffice as a “refutation” of the alleged cause and effect, and that’s what (B) provides—a specific example in which the assertion in the first sentence does not hold. With the author’s example supporting the conclusion and (B)’s denying it, we’re left at a stalemate. (A) People’s preferences are outside the scope here and don’t have anything necessarily to do with what’s good or bad for a civilization. (C), if anything, strengthens the author’s case by explaining how money may cause, or at least contribute to, a civilization’s decline. (D) asserts an unwarranted distinction between gold and paper, which the author lumps together as being bad for civilization. Also, of course, we have no idea how the exchange rate figures into this equation. (E), if anything, supports the argument that money—especially paper money, which is what most employees get—is bad. By choosing to compensate employees with goods—that is, with “articles of intrinsic value”—instead of “worthless” money, the mentality of the employers in (E) is at least consistent with the attitude of the author.

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• Always be alert to references to cause-and-effect . . . and expect many authors to mistake it for correlation. 3. (D) The conclusion is the last sentence’s prediction that importing predators into the U.S. will stop the increase in U.S. fire ants, and the evidence is the past success of this strategy on fire ants in Brazil. Four assumptions connect evidence and conclusion, and some students will try to locate the “odd man out” and proceed to (D) directly by noticing its scope shift. The goal of the strategy is to protect the environment by stopping the increase in the fire ant population, not to restrict the spread of the ants to northern states. Even if (D) is false, even if the use of predators wouldn’t prevent some northern spread of the fire ants, the strategy still might be useful in reducing the ant population overall—which is its goal! Since (D) can be denied with no damage to the logic, it is not a necessary assumption here. Other students will, in a situation like this, choose to locate the four assumptions, and here pre-phrasing is certainly in order: (A) You may very well have wondered whether the plan has any major drawbacks. The author—eager to sic those predators on the ants—doesn’t seem concerned about drawbacks, so he must be taking for granted that the “cure” won’t be worse than the “disease” (A). (B) Perhaps the most obvious assumption here is that what worked in Brazil will work in the U.S., which is (B). (C), (E) Finally, the author assumes that the plan will work without a hitch, which leads us to the remaining two choices. If the U.S. ants are able to kill the predators, then the plan will fail; so the author is assuming that that won’t happen (C). The plan will also fail if the rate of increase is so huge that even the predators can’t slow it; so the author is assuming that that won’t occur either (E). • An “All of the following are assumptions EXCEPT” question tells you two things: (1) the argument must be pretty vulnerable, what with four “gaps” between the evidence and conclusion, and (2) the right answer will be either outside the scope of the argument (as (D) is here), or contradictory to it. 4. (B) Wanting people to buy the pesticide, and afraid that they won’t if they fear its toxicity in plants, the manufacturer argues that there’s less of the toxic stuff in the pesticide than in everyday mouthwash, “ounce for ounce.” That last phrase is the one that should grab you. OK, so the stuff is safe ounce for ounce. But how many ounces are we talking about here? How much of the stuff does a person take in? If, as (B) says, the quantity of toxins that a person ingests from plants exposed to the stuff vastly exceeds the quantity ingested from mouthwash, then the manufacturer’s “ounce-for ounce” defense of the product is ill-taken.

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(A) fails to address the issue of the toxins in the pesticides. Until that’s addressed, the mouthwash remains a basis of comparison only, and the comparison of mouthwash to other cosmetic products is irrelevant to the argument that the pesticide is safe. (C) The clarity of toxicity warnings is irrelevant to the safety of the product itself, and to the ad claim made by the manufacturer, which are after all what the question is asking about. (D) At best, the rate at which toxins become harmful is irrelevant to the question of the manufacturer’s claims here. At worst, (D) slightly supports those claims, by speaking to the relative safety of the pesticide product as compared with mouthwash. (E) Government regulation and pesticide awareness may be relevant to the overall issue of pesticide use, but not to this specific argument about this specific product. • What’s true of a part of the whole isn’t necessarily true of the whole itself—a concept often tested on the LSAT. Ounce for ounce, the pesticide stacks up well with mouthwash, according to the manufacturer. But that’s only part of the story. How much of this stuff is actually ingested from plants treated with the pesticide is the real issue here. 5. (D) We’re looking for an inference that can properly be derived from the stimulus. There are four research companies estimating the population of the same three cities. For two of the cities, all the estimates agree; for the third city, the estimates vary widely. How come? The difference is that the first two cities are stable while the third city is “growing rapidly.” There’s one thing we can deduce with certainty up front: Since the companies’ estimates for the rapidly growing city vary so wildly, someone’s got to be wrong. That’s not among the choices, however, so as is often the case with Inference questions, we’ll have to evaluate the choices, looking for the one that’s supported best by the information at hand. (A), (E) Unwarranted distinctions. No surveys of smaller cities are made here (A), nor is any mention made about current vs. future estimates (E). Neither of these comparisons is inferable here from the information given. (B) The paragraph stops short of mentioning, let alone evaluating, the uses to which the data might be put. The “usefulness” of the data is outside the scope. (C), if anything, works against the implicit general idea that it’s difficult to determine the population of a rapidly-growing city. But even if you didn’t see that, you should have seen that there’s no way to infer anything about the rate of population change here—it very likely may fluctuate. (D) Since all four estimates are roughly the same for the stable cities in this study, it’s reasonable to say that these companies’ population estimates for stable cities in general will likely coincide. And if they do, then their reliability must be roughly the same, whether they’re all right on, or all way off.

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• Notice how correct choice (D) is highly qualified, by virtue of the word “likely.” To say that the companies would definitely be equally reliable in their estimates of stable cities might be a bit of a stretch; but to say that it’s likely is perfectly in the realm of believability—and perfectly in line with the phrasing of the stem. • Of course, (D) also comes to the fore because of the problems with all of the wrong choices. You need not be fully in love with (D) in order to conclude that among the five choices, it’s the one that’s best supported by the text. 6. (E) Next up we need a fact that accounts for the disparity between the companies’ agreement on the population estimates for the two stable cities, and their profound DISagreement on the estimate for the growing city. There has to be some factor that will account for the difference, but it may not be easy to pre-phrase what they’re looking for here. Most students will therefore evaluate each choice in turn: (A) Finding “uniformity” in the growing city’s demographics deepens, rather than solves, the mystery of why these companies all disagree on how many people live there. (B) The reason for the one city’s growth is irrelevant to the disparity in survey results. Whatever the reason, there must be something more going on to get such a curious outcome. (C) It is not necessarily tougher to estimate the number of young people vs. older people, so the difference in average age, while being perfectly consistent with the data in the stimulus, doesn’t at all speak to the odd survey results. (D) describes the methodology employed on the growing city. But since (D) doesn’t contrast the methods used on the stable ones, it cannot explain the difference in data. In fact, (D), like (A), may even deepen the mystery by showing that all the companies used roughly the same method for estimating the population of the growing city, and still came out with widely divergent results. (E) does the trick. That the companies’ methodologies differed in their estimates of the growing city as opposed to the stable ones would help to explain why the results on the former were all over the map while the results on the latter jibed well. When survey methods are the same, one will not be surprised that their results are the same. When survey methods differ, it’s much less of a surprise to find disagreeing data. • As you study your practice questions, pay just as much attention to the explanations of the ones you got wrong as the ones you got right. Every question—and, therefore, every Kaplan explanation—has the potential to teach you something for test day, whether or not you got the question right in practice. Don’t shortchange yourself.

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7. (A) There are two scope shifts going on here, one fairly obvious, one more subtle. The obvious one is the movement from the motorcyclist evidence to the conclusion about horseback riders; the two riders are linked in that they can both suffer serious head injuries. But the risk of injury per se is not (according to the author) why some jurisdictions have required motorcyclists to wear helmets, nor why the author wants other areas to do so and why she wants to expand the requirement to horseback riders. The real reason is cost: in the second, third, and fourth sentences the author emphasizes that wearing helmets reduces injury and hence reduces the huge financial drain on taxpayers. Seeing the evidence shift the scope from injuries to cost should lead you to (A), because without (A) we cannot be sure that a helmet law for horseback riders is a good idea for the same reason that it works for motorcyclists. Unless and until we learn that horseback riders’ head injuries cause a financial drain, we cannot agree that achieving “similar cost reductions” is a proper justification for a horseback riders’ helmet law akin to the motorcycle-helmet law. (B) speaks to the difference in likelihood of injury alluded to in the last sentence, but the argument doesn’t depend on some justification for this difference. What the argument does need is a statement of similarity: a similarity between the costs of the two types of nonhelmeted injury. (C) rightly hits on the issue of cost, but goes astray elsewhere: It makes an unwarranted and unhelpful distinction between head injuries (of all types) and other types of injuries. Those “others” are outside the scope here. (D) Fatalities and their prevention are not part of this argument; injuries and their cost are. (E) By putting citizens’ safety above all other considerations when looking at helmet laws, (E) goes against the grain of the author’s apparent belief that reducing the cost to taxpayers is the central justification for the enactment of these laws. • This is a great example of why you should always study the question stem before reading the stimulus. You know that the conclusion deals with helmets for horseback riders, and hence you can put all the motorcycle evidence in its proper context. 8. (D) The senator’s position—that no work of art can be obscene, and hence that the world of art has nothing to do with protecting the public—is attacked by means of counterexamples, works of art that people call obscene. His response? “[I]f [they] really are obscene then they cannot be works of art.” But that statement is just the contrapositive of the meaning of his original remark. “No work of art can be obscene” means “IF a work of art, THEN not obscene.” Reverse and negate both terms and you get the senator’s statement in the last sentence. So what’s wrong with the reasoning? The senator provides no independent evidence as to the nature of obscenity and the nature of art—he defends the original principle by invoking its contrapositive, that is, its logical equivalent. So he is guilty of “circular reasoning” or, as (D) puts it, assuming the truth of that which he is trying to prove.

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(A) The senator uses no emotional language or appeal. He is trying to persuade by logic, but he fails because he begs the question by restating his conclusion as if it offered more support. That’s what (D) is saying. (B) Au contraire, his points are logically equivalent (as mentioned above, contrapositives of one another)—not contradictory. (C) would be true if he alleged (however absurdly) “Art is not obscene because I am a senator and what I say goes.” There is, of course, no such assertion of authority here. (E) Again, his appeal is to his own conclusion; he veers off not into the irrelevant, but into the redundant. • “Circular reasoning,” or “assuming one’s conclusion,” is when one’s evidence and conclusion are functionally identical. Since such arguments show up on the LSAT only occasionally, those terms are usually mentioned in wrong choices rather than correct ones. 9. (A) Why must Hastings have been disloyal? Because if his firing was justified, then he must have been either incompetent or disloyal, but the former is ruled out. That seems to leave only the latter, “disloyal”—but all of that rests on the key issue of justification, which merely appears in an “if” clause in the argument. To proceed from that conditional “if” clause to her categorical conclusion, the author must be taking for granted that that “if” clause is confirmed—that Hastings’ firing was in fact justified. The Denial Test proves it: If contrary to (A) Hastings’ firing was not justified, then we have no evidence upon which to base a finding of disloyalty. (B) Hastings’ rank, high or otherwise, goes unmentioned, so the author need not be assuming anything about it. (C) The scope of this argument is Hastings and Hastings only; the author need not assume anything about others. (D) According to the author, someone justifiably dismissed could be loyal—as long as s/he was incompetent. Since (D) flies in the face of the second sentence, it certainly can’t be the assumption we seek here. (E) commits the “fallacy of affirming the consequent,” i.e. reversing the if and then terms of sentence two. The author doesn’t do so; she simply takes for granted that her “if” clause is affirmed . . . which, again, is (A). • Scope is a concept just as important in Logical Reasoning as it is in Reading Comprehension. Always be aware of the author’s scope, and avoid choices that depart from it.

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• Don’t overlook the little words! Noticing that the second sentence begins with the word “if,” and understanding the conditional situation that follows from this word (which the author goes on to forget about or ignore), are the keys to getting this point. 10. (D) Were you able to spot the common logical flaw in this reasoning? Hopefully you recognized the author’s confusion of necessary and sufficient conditions, and searched the choices looking for a similar mistake. It’s helpful to translate the first sentence into if-then form: IF you don’t answer questions, THEN you’re not a competent doctor. So answering questions is necessary to being a good doctor. Fine. But then the author goes on to say that “Since my doctor answers my questions fully, she must be competent.” Uh-oh! The author mistakes a condition necessary for being a good doctor (answering questions) for one that’s sufficient for being a good doctor. Being a good question answerer is required of good doctors, but that doesn’t mean that’s the only requirement—a doctor can answer questions well and still be a bad doctor for other reasons. So we’re to find a situation in which necessity and sufficiency are confused in a similar manner. Check out the choices: (A) Close, but no cigar: Being accustomed to making compromises is necessary to growing up in a large family. But being accustomed to making compromises doesn’t guarantee that one grew up in a large family; others can certainly pick up this habit as well. So (A) seems to be in line with the original, but veers off at the last moment: (A) would exhibit the same necessary/sufficient confusion of the original if it concluded “therefore Meredith MUST have grown up in a large family.” But the tentative nature of (A)’s conclusion has no parallel to the stimulus. (B) is proper logic. Jeanne, like any other opponent of the issue, must be ill-informed. Not flawed, so not parallel. (C) Paul’s situation contradicts the first sentence, which said that all those who like music never miss a performance. He likes music, yet blew off the performance. Curious. We can characterize this scenario as “an exception to a general rule,” which is not the action of the stimulus argument. There’s no confusion of necessary and sufficient conditions in (C), so (C) is not parallel to the original. (D) If someone works two or more jobs, that person cannot find a balance between career and personal life. Is there an element of necessity here? Yup: Working fewer than two jobs is a necessary requirement for balance. Maggie meets this condition—she has only one job. And just like in the original, the author of (D) treats this necessary condition as sufficient in concluding that Maggie can therefore achieve balance between career and personal life. Not necessarily! She’s cleared this one hurdle, but for all we know working fewer than two jobs is not the only thing necessary to achieving such balance. Same confusion, same result—(D)’s the winner here.

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(E) There’s necessity here as well: It’s necessary to be cool and easygoing (or however we wish to describe “not hot-tempered and strong-willed”) to succeed. Jeremy fails to meet one of the conditions right off the bat (he is strong-willed), so (E) deviates already on this count. There can be no confusion of a necessary for a sufficient condition if Jeremy doesn’t meet the necessary condition in the first place. (E) is flawed, sure: We cannot conclude from the mere fact of Jeremy’s strong will that he won’t succeed in the business, because we know nothing of his hot temper. This flaw, however, is far from the flaw in the original. • In “Find the Parallel Flaw” questions, often the easiest choices to eliminate are ones that exhibit valid reasoning. Your response to (B) should have been “that sounds reasonable . . .”—which should have enabled you to cut (B) right away. • Make sure you’re crystal clear on the issue of necessity vs. sufficiency. Often this concept will be tested in Inference and Logical Flaw questions. Here, it constituted the pattern of flawed reasoning that we had to spot among the choices. 11. (A) Since Stevens’ article was accepted for publication, it must have met sentence 1’s two necessary conditions for publication—submitted prior to March 6 (which we’re told), and written by a certified psychoanalyst (which we’re not told but must be true anyway, because otherwise the passage would be self-contradictory). We are told that Stevens “publishes frequently in psychoanalytic literature,” but don’t be fooled—that’s not the same as saying that he is, in fact, a certified psychoanalyst. But he has to be—choice (A)— because it’s a necessary condition for the article’s publication. (Note that (A) would be equally correct, and maybe even a little more precise, if it read “Stevens is a certified psychoanalyst.”) (B) distorts sentence 2: The fact that Stevens publishes frequently in psychoanalytic literature doesn’t tell us in which publications his articles appear. Sure, this article was accepted by the Journal, but we can’t conclude from the info given that the Journal “frequently accepts Stevens’ articles.” For all we know, this acceptance is a rare exception, and most of Stevens’ articles appear elsewhere. (C) isn’t necessarily what the author means by “certified.” For all we know Stevens is certified but not an authority; or perhaps he’s an authority in one field rather than many. (D) This particular article might not be one of the articles that the Journal actively solicited. If sentence 1 stated that the Journal only publishes solicited articles, then (D) would be inferable. But it just says that the Journal often solicits articles, so (D) isn’t inferable. (E) The passage’s scope is this one article, and the Journal’s publication criteria. Audience interest is outside that scope. • If two conditions are necessary for a conclusion to be met, and we are told that the conclusion is met, then both of the conditions must be true. That’s what “necessity” means.

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12. (C) Determining the point of the argument hinges on one tiny phrase: “so-and-so is like arguing that the yeti etc.” To be sure, all the rest of the evidence concerns the Himalayan yeti, but that’s all in the service of “so-and-so,” the analogy that precedes the yeti material. The point is that just as the absence of documentation for the yeti doesn’t prove that it doesn’t exist, the absence of documentation for European/East Asian trade in a certain time frame doesn’t prove that it didn’t happen. It’s the historical trade issue that the author is interested in; the yeti is just used as analogous evidence. (C) is right on. (A) The author applies the term “scientific confirmation” to the yeti example only, and anyway it doesn’t really apply to a situation in which one is trying to prove whether trade existed between two world regions. (B) The author never indicates that we need evidence from both sides; we can’t even be sure that the author agrees with (B), and so (B) cannot be the main point of the argument. (D) focuses on disproving the idea that the author seems interested in proving or, at least, keeping alive (that these two areas traded during the Middle Ages). The author, by use of the analogy, tries to say the opposite: Just because there are no records, that alone doesn’t disprove the existence of the trade. (E) merely compares the relative amounts of evidence for the two analogous alleged phenomena, when what the author’s trying to do is keep alive the possibility of trade between Europe and East Asia in the face of the absence of evidence. (E) gives too much prominence to the place of the yeti example in the argument; as discussed above, it’s there to shed light on the trade issue, and is thus not part of the main point itself. • There’s a good chance that somewhere on your LSAT, most likely in Logical Reasoning, they’ll test whether you know what an analogy is and how to properly apply it. Be watchful. 13. (E) Here, the yeti example really has nothing to do with the trade issue; it’s just a parallel. Thus this argument shouldn’t be hard to counter. We want a choice indicating that the absence of hard evidence for European/East Asian trade is significant, that it damages the trade hypothesis; and that’s exactly what (E) does. There do exist written records that should mention such trade had it actually gone on, but don’t. That’s pretty strong counterevidence: (E) provides a situation in which the absence of references to an event has a profound impact on determining whether it did in fact occur. If (E) is true, we’re less likely to believe that the absence of evidence is no big deal—it now seems like a really big deal, and the author’s argument appears to be sunk. (A) If anything, the author would cling to (A) as support for his idea that the absence of written reports doesn’t deny that European/East Asian trade existed. (B) has much the same problem as (B) did in Q. 12: The argument doesn’t hinge on the need for TWO-WAY proof that this kind of trade went on, so appealing to that issue cannot strengthen or weaken the logic.

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(B) Just because East Asia had records and Europe didn’t doesn’t mean that trade did or did not exist between the areas. We have no idea what the records said, and so their mere existence tells us nothing. (C) The nature of European/East Asian trade is utterly irrelevant unless it has an effect on written records of such trade—which (C)’s facts do not. (D) We might have expected a choice or two dealing only with the yeti, ready to trap those who failed to see the real topic and scope of the argument. Hope you weren’t one of them. As mentioned above in Q. 12, the yeti is used only to illustrate the real point, so even if proof positive were found of the yeti’s existence, its impact on whether Europe and East Asia traded during the Middle Ages would be zilch. • Arguments by analogy are weak by definition, since one’s opponent can either just deny that the analogy is valid or come up with a counter-analogy of his own. Look for the LSAT writers to use this point as the basis for questions. 14. (B) This Parallel Reasoning stimulus lends itself nicely to an algebraic treatment. If the economy is in recession (X), then demand is low (Y), and if demand is low, then interest rates are low (Z). Combining these statements, we get “if X, then Z,” and the author concludes with the contrapositive of this—“if not Z [if interest rates aren’t low] then not X [no recession].” So this is valid logic, paralleled exactly by (B), where X = the ready fish, Y = cooked all the way through, and Z = white. Both arguments conclude correctly that if the Z is not so, the X cannot be so. (A) starts with an X and Y term that complement each other: a full restaurant means a full parking lot and vice versa. There’s no subsequent “Z” term brought in, so (A) isn’t parallel. (C), too, only gives us an X and Y term: X = flying by flapping wings, and Y = warmblooded. Then we get negations of these terms: “Gliding” is used as “not X,” and “coldblooded” is, of course, “not Y.” Just like in choice (A), there’s no true “Z” term. Furthermore, the phrase “if they flew at all” has no parallel in the original anywhere. (D) Here, we could reasonably say that X = pleats, Y = doubled material, and Z = having none left for the top. The conclusion is that if X (if you want pleats) then Z (won’t make the top). This is valid reasoning, but as you’ll recall, the original argument doesn’t formally combine the statements in this way—it concludes with the contrapositive of the combination of the first two statements. (D) fails to go on to draw this final conclusion. It would be parallel if, instead of the last sentence, it finished with “if you have material left for the top, then you didn’t want to put in pleats.” (E) has its X, Y, and Z terms right, but concludes that if Z (if the party loses) then X (the forecasters were right). This is classic faulty logic: The forecasters could be wrong, and yet the governing party could still lose for other reasons besides inflation. Bad logic, and not parallel.

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• Not every Parallel Reasoning stimulus lends itself to algebraic translation; but when it does, the technique can be very effective. 15. (B) Sentence 1 is factual only: The potato crop in Rosinia is down about 40 million tons from 20 years ago. Sentence 2 is the argument, the explanation as to why this is so: The researchers who have failed to come up with new high-yield potato strains are at fault. Well, if the failure to produce higher-yielding crops has caused a decrease in the harvest, then the old strains of potatoes must not have produced the yields that they used to. Check out the Denial Test: If (B) is false, if the old strain of spuds are producing as well as ever, then the lack of higher-yielding strains wouldn’t by itself explain the harvest’s drop; it would only account for a failure to increase the harvest. In short, if (B) is false, blame for the situation must be placed elsewhere than on the researchers. Since (B), when denied, weakens the logic, (B) as written is a necessary assumption. (A) goes too far. Though the researchers haven’t produced new high-yield strains so far, the author needn’t assume that they never will. (C), by implying that a researcher working selfishly could still come up with something that would benefit Rosinia, somewhat undermines the argument that the researchers’ failure is due to their misplaced motives. (D) weakens the logic in a different way from (C), by suggesting that the differences in harvest size might be a natural fluctuation, rather than a steady reduction to be blamed on researchers. (E) is outside the scope, since the argument never refers to funding or government involvement. Nothing need be assumed about this. • As you read an argument, keep stepping back from it and asking: What’s the nature and purpose of each sentence? (See above.) Doing so will keep you sharp and analytical, and will prevent you from becoming too wrapped up in the content. 16. (E) Some students believe that the story of an army stopping to drink a lake dry must have actually occurred, because there’s evidence that water-based life died off there at the same time as the alleged “big gulp.” Well, heads up here: Just because there is an indication that a certain effect (here, the drying up of the lake) took place, we cannot use it as evidence that any one particular cause for that effect—whether far-fetched or plausible—must have taken place. Any number of things could have decimated the water-based life at that lakesite (drought brought on by climactic changes, for example), and this legend is but one of them. Put another way: The archaeological evidence may very well suggest that the water disappeared at the time the legend has it; that is, that the effect described in the text is correct—the lake did go dry. But that doesn’t lend credence to the text’s assertion that a million thirsty warriors slurped it away.

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(A) The conclusion is not a generalization; it is an assertion about the truth of one specific event at one specific locale. (B) No “counterevidence” is mentioned. What the students are “ignoring” is the fact that no one cause for an effect is any better than another cause, until persuasive evidence is cited. (C) A self-contradiction is when one asserts two things that cannot both be true. Not so here. The story of the army drinking the lake could be true (if unlikely); it doesn’t contradict the little field evidence discovered. Besides, (C) contradicts the spirit of the stimulus—if anything, the students are accepting, not rejecting something (although what they’re accepting is better described as a legend than a “hypothesis”). (D) For all we know, historians have substantiated the existence of an army of Pavonian enemies at the time. And the location is certainly real, too, as verified by the archaeologists. • Always be wary when a stimulus describes an allegation of cause-and-effect. Causality is very tough to prove, and hence is the basis of many reasoning errors (and hence is at the heart of many LSAT questions). Ask yourself: MUST the effect be the result of an alleged cause, or could something else be at work here? 17. (A) Before weakening the skeptics’ suggestion we need to know what they’re skeptical about, and it’s the timeline that has been posited between human activities and the carbon dating at each level of the Pennsylvania rock shelter. What’s controversial here is the deepest carbon sample. If this is a timeline of human activity, then the earliest humans must have inhabited the site approximately 20,000 years ago. It’s that that the skeptics take issue with: since that dating conflicts with what has been believed about the arrival of humans in North America, they suggest that contamination is to blame, that the carbon simply seeped out of nearby coal deposits into the lowest level (and, thus, that the presence of carbon that deep has nothing to do with human activity at all). Now, there is no evidence that carbon contamination occurred; it’s simply a plausible alternative theory that the skeptics have cooked up because they don’t like the one at hand (i.e. that humans lived in North America 20,000 years ago). So if we can render that alternative theory IMplausible, then we will have shut the skeptics up—and that’s just what (A) does. According to (A), if such carbon contamination had occurred, it could only have done so by contaminating the upper levels too, which would fly in the face of the excellent correlation between carbon samples and human activity above. (After all, since the uppermost layers have been dated to the present, they clearly have not been contaminated.) In other words, (A) says that in the absence of contamination evidence up above, it’s totally unlikely that contamination could have occurred below—which, again, effectively silences the skeptics. (B)’s suggestion of an occasional weakness in the carbon-dating technique doesn’t necessarily affect this application of the technique.

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(C) at best is irrelevant (human use of coal is not part of either the original theory or that of the skeptics), and at worst is an au-contraire choice, since the skeptics are trying to deny the presence of humans 20,000 years ago and (C) seems to support that denial. (D) merely speaks to the accuracy of the carbon dating, but what is at issue are the inferences that can be drawn from it with regard to humanity. (E) is certainly au contraire. This is in line with the skeptics’ view that this Pennsylvania site’s early carbon sampling is an anomaly, and not an effective challenge to earlier estimates of when humans appeared in North America. • What makes a difficult LR question difficult is often the juxtaposing of several points of view. Make sure you clearly formulate the gist of each point of view before you start analyzing the answer choices, and always keep in mind which viewpoint you’re asked to critique, strengthen, weaken, etc. 18. (A) A categorical conclusion: There’s no scientific reason to reject astrology, despite the widespread opinion that those who believe in astrology are credulous and unscientific. As proof, the author offers many people of scientific brilliance in years past who took astrology as fact. Well, this represents a scope shift from what was once believed true to what now is believed true, and (A) puts its finger on it. That astrology was accepted at an earlier time does not mean, with the advances of science that followed, that it has to be accepted now. That which the earlier scientists took to be true may long since have been disproved. (B) argues that there’s no point in arguing for or against a “controversial” opinion, which would end all debate on everything. Talk about specious: Here’s a specious point of view. (C) Even if (C) is true, and the great scientists who once accepted astrology were only those influenced by Western science, that doesn’t affect the argument’s validity. Astrology either is scientific or it isn’t, for all cultures. (D) The argument assumes that modern Western science makes people reject astrology, so (D) makes no sense. (E) is beside the point. The argument is only concerned with scientific reasons to accept or reject astrology. It is certainly true that nonscientific reasons have been left out, or “overlooked,” but, as nonscientific reasons are outside the scope here, that omission doesn’t take anything away from the argument. • Scope shifts between evidence and conclusion are common, and when they occur are almost always at the heart of the question you’re being asked. Always be on the lookout for them!

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19. (D) It’s easy to get lost in all the verbiage until you see the structure underneath, which turns out to be like a “logic tree” or “decision tree”—it’s simply a matter of following the formal logic trail, and remembering, from previewing the stem, that we’re looking for something that must be false. Sentence 1 raises the issue: Will McConnell decide to run against Lutz? Sentences 2 and 3 raise two possibilities: Either Lutz has a big war chest (sentence 2) or he doesn’t (sentence 3). If the former, McConnell will bow out. If the latter, she’s a step closer to getting into the race, but needs to investigate Lutz, and sentences 4 and 5 state the only two outcomes: Either Lutz has skeletons in his closet (sentence 4), which will improve her chances of winning, in which case McConnell will run; or else, Lutz is clean (sentence 5), and she won’t. In essence, then, there is only one scenario under which McConnell will run against Lutz: He lacks a big war chest AND he has scandalous skeletons in his closet. Thus (D) contradicts the passage, since it presents a case in which Lutz’s record doesn’t enhance McConnell’s chances (which is code for “he has no scandals”), yet she runs anyway. According to the passage, she explicitly would NOT run under these circumstances. (A) would be true if—emboldened by Lutz’s lacking a big war chest—McConnell went on to investigate but found no scandals in his record. She would then choose not to run. (B) is perfectly consistent with the only scenario under which McConnell would oppose Lutz. (C) could be true if Lutz had a big campaign war chest, in which case McConnell would choose not to oppose him even before it got to the point of checking out his record. Remember the order of events in her decision tree: Scandalous items means she’ll run only after she’s determined that he’s not loaded. (E), of course, would close the matter immediately. Lutz’s big money would (sentence 2) cause McConnell to opt out of the race, so (E) jibes perfectly with the conditions in the stimulus. • In a case such as this, where the right answer contradicts the passage, the four wrong choices are consistent with it. It is therefore your call as to whether you want to go after the odd man out directly, or keep throwing out consistent ones until you locate the one contradictor. Either approach is efficient.

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20. (C) The conclusion (which, as we already know from the stem, is flawed) is utterly categorical: There is just no way that psychotherapy, as some have alleged, can be a form of coercion. Why not? Because of a dichotomy the author sees: Coercion restricts people’s choices, while the goal of psychotherapy is to make it easier for people to make choices. But is the contradiction as clear-cut as the author believes? What if—contrary to its stated goals— psychotherapy in some cases has the end result of restricting the ways in which people run their lives? What if some psychotherapists coerce their patients into following only a certain set of choices? In either case, psychotherapy might be just as restrictive and “coercive” as its critics allege. Look at it this way: If the second clause of the second sentence read like so, the argument would be stronger: “...and people who go through psychotherapy always leave with an enhanced ability to make choices.” But then the evidence would be focusing on the way psychotherapy takes place and not merely its goal. As (C) says, losing sight of the possible difference between psychotherapy’s goals, and its practices and actual results, is where the author goes wrong. (A) In no sense is the author stacking the deck by “redefining” terms “unfairly.” (How would we be in a position to distinguish fair and unfair, anyway?) She simply defines each term in the statement she is rebutting so that she can put forth her position. She can do no less in order to make her rebuttal, and does so straightforwardly, as far as we can see. (B) Whatever its goals and whatever their number, if the end result of psychotherapy is coercion, then the argument remains weak. The number of goals of psychotherapy is not the issue here, so (B) sidesteps the problem. (D) The author does seem to believe that the means and ends of psychotherapy are identical—in fact, another way correct choice (C) could have been written is that the author “fails to see that the means and goals need not be the same.” But that is different from stating that the means are “justified.” Justification for a practice is not the author’s purpose here; it’s rebutting a point of view. (E) If psychotherapy were proven to be a form of moral coercion, then a defender of psychotherapy might follow (E)’s lead and show that coercion might not always be a bad thing. But our author preempts that tactic by trying to show that the term “coercion” doesn’t even apply to psychotherapy. • When examining an argument that the stem tells you is flawed, ask yourself: What could be done to the argument to improve it? The answer to this question may help you identify the flaw as written.

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21. (E) Joel defines “myth” as a narrative conveying the community’s wisdom, and goes on to deny that myth can exist today because of the absence of such communal wisdom. Giselle disagrees, pointing out an example (the very word might have made (E) tempting) of a myth that exists in the modern world and is accepted by one particular community (doctors). Giselle acknowledges that part of her counterexample doesn’t apply to Joel’s definition—the myth of the body-as-machine isn’t a narrative—but she argues that it is a myth nonetheless. For medical people, at least, the Myth of the Machine is a powerful and generally accepted truth; it conveys that community’s traditional wisdom. (E) has it right: This counterexample, this modern myth, calls into question Joel’s claim that a myth must be a narrative. (A) distorts Giselle’s science-based example into “a scientific explanation.” And the “problem” is not one of literary theory, but of reality: Does myth—can myth—flourish today? (B) is tempting because Giselle does seem to use an analogy (the body is like a machine) as the basis of her modern myth, but her overall position is contrary to Joel’s, not analogous to it. (C) comes closer to characterizing Joel’s statement than Giselle’s. He speaks of “traditional wisdom” and “the modern world,” while she draws no distinction between past and present. (D) Giselle’s rhetorical question is meant to suggest that the community of medical specialists would agree with her that the body-as-machine qualifies as a real myth. In no way does she imply that Joel is one of their number. • Whenever answer choices are written in abstract terms, be sure to take a stab at prephrasing an answer before getting caught up in all of the abstraction. Even a prephrasing that’s not too close to the real answer can still help you to avoid wrong choices. 22. (A) The conclusion, first of all, is a comparison. On the issue of which classification will better reflect the scientific significance of some fossils, the author votes for a recent one over the one proposed by the discoverer of the fossils, Walcott. But the author doesn’t (as she should) discuss the superiority of this recent classification over Walcott’s; she simply argues that as a member of the science elite, Walcott’s view would simply mimic the views of the establishment. As choice (A) has it, this is drawing a conclusion about a position based on the source of the position rather than on the position’s actual merit. (B) The first piece of evidence cited is that Walcott was a big shot in the scientific elite, which is more “verifiable” than (B) lets on. The second piece is a conclusion (sentence 3) that follows from the first, and it too could be verified: One could verify whether Walcott simply confirmed what established science deemed true.

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(C) See the analysis of the evidence in (B), above. These premises don’t contradict each other; the second follows from the first. (D) Denying that “not X” can be true in order to prove that “X” is true is questionable logic, yes, but not the issue here. The evidence concerns Walcott’s standing in the scientific community and ignores his science; that’s the problem. (E) jumbles past and present. That Walcott’s classification was made in the past is not relevant to the main objection, which is that his views were simply mimicking those of the scientific elite. That “category” (that of the elite) could just as readily apply to Walcott then as now. • In Logical Flaw questions, determine whether the author is addressing the merits of a position or merely rejecting it out of hand. 23. (D) Judith so clearly lays out the issues that we don’t really need to read Anthony’s remark at all (though we should, of course). She doesn’t deny his conclusion, but she rejects the way he’s reached it. What she is pointing out, of course, is the difference between correlation and causation. Anthony asserts that since there’s a high correlation between heroin and prior marijuana use, the latter must lead to the former. But as Judith points out, there’s a perfect correlation between drinking water and heroin use, yet it would be idiotic to argue cause-and-effect there. She shows, then, the silly result that can occur when one mistakes correlation for causality. (D) puts this in slightly more formal terms. (A) She quibbles not with the accuracy of his statistic, but the use to which it’s put. (B) distorts Judith’s use of “absurd.” She doesn’t derive anything from his conclusion; rather, she comes up with a parallel argument illustrating the weakness in his reasoning. It is his method of deriving his conclusion (assuming that correlation necessarily implies causation) that Judith believes can lead to absurd consequences. (C) The safety of heroin use isn’t the issue. Judith’s objection is methodological, not pharmaceutical. She is using the notion that drinking water does not lead to heroin use to illustrate the absurdity of Anthony’s reasoning, so (C) is way off base. (E) goes too far by inferring that because she takes issue with Anthony’s use of a statistic, Judith must believe that no causal connection can be supported by statistics. She implies nothing as sweeping as this; (E) is too extreme to be Judith’s method here. • The LSAT regularly tests the ability to distinguish between correlation (an assertion that X and Y tend to occur together) and causation (an assertion that X causes Y). Be alert for this.

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24. (B) Here’s a different misuse of statistics. All of the percentages compared are parts of the same wholes: total revenues two years ago vs. now. Compared with two years ago, the car makers’ share has dropped 15%; parts suppliers’ share has gone up 5% and service companies’, 10%. But these are all just parts of the pie. The initial question—have auto revenues declined?—has to do with the overall pie itself, and no matter how the shares have varied over the last two years, the data never address the central issue of what has happened to the overall total. (B)’s wording is a little oblique, but speaks to the scope shift that the author commits: Since all the parts must add up to 100%, only information about that 100% is relevant. Regardless of the increases cited, revenue for the overall industry may very well be declining, and (B) helps point out why the increases cited can’t be used to explain away the rumored decrease in overall industry revenues in the way the author intends. (A) The source of the statistics is irrelevant to whether the statistics are being properly used. (C) demands a reason for the change in shares, but that’s beside the point. Has the overall total dropped or hasn’t it, and does the change in shares support the case one way or the other? (D) speaks to the relationships among the different sectors of the industry. Again, no impact on the basic question under consideration. (E) The argument is about revenues only, not profits. • LSAT wrong answers often accuse the motives behind, or accuracy of, statistical data. Right answers tend to focus on the use to which the data are put, especially when the flawed reasoning is based on a faulty application of statistics. 25. (E) First, a proposal is mentioned: to extend the U.S. school year in the Japanese and European manner. Then an objection is cited: Ditching summer vacation would violate a long tradition. Finally, the conclusion—the “objection misses its mark”—and the evidence: the “tradition” began because farmers needed kids to be free to work during the summer. The real tradition to follow, the author says, would be to follow the needs of the economy in scheduling school (which in turn might warrant changing the school year, as is being proposed). The principle that backs up this logic is going to focus on the reasons underlying a tradition (i.e. the reason that the objection “misses its mark”), and that’s (E), which firmly distinguishes between a tradition itself and the reasons for the tradition in the first place. Following (E) to the letter would mandate going beyond the sheer 3-month summer vacation to the reason it was first instituted, which in turn would support the author’s view that the proposal wouldn’t defy tradition in the way that the opponents claim.

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(A) encourages the changing of policies and traditions that conflict with more pressing needs. But the author’s point is that, correctly understood, lengthening the school year wouldn’t really violate a tradition at all. In the same way, (B), (C), and (D) all intend to attack, or at least to limit, the importance of tradition, but the author is trying to show that a policy change (eliminating summer vacation) is not out of line with tradition—the real tradition as she explains it in the paragraph. The anti-traditionalist sentiment of all four wrong choices hurts, rather than helps, the author’s mission here. • The author’s purpose is a very important and much talked about issue, but students often lose sight of it in “the heat of battle.” Always try to determine why an author is making an argument and is making the claims she does. Doing so will help you, whether your job is simply to analyze the logic or to fiddle with it in some way. 26. (C) “What is tradition?” That’s the author’s question. She argues that it should be understood differently, based not upon the specific practice (three months of vacation) but rather upon its intent (economic need). (C) paraphrases this nicely. (A) The author accepts that schools are shut down for three months. That’s not in dispute. (B) Au contraire, the author expressly uses historical practices in formulating her approach to the problem under discussion. (D) The author isn’t really attacking her opponents personally, as (D) implies. At most, she is asserting not that they don’t care about tradition but that they have misunderstood it. (E) sort of sounds like the author’s approval of the proposal. But “the rest of the industrialized world” goes way beyond simply “Japan and Europe.” And she stops short of “demonstrating” that tradition would demand revoking summer vacation. To do so, she’d have to provide evidence as to the economic need for summer school, but she doesn’t. • Sometimes when a stimulus generates two questions, the second is easier to answer than the first. Get in the habit of scanning both stems and deciding which order suits you better. Take control of your exam, to every extent that you can.

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SECTION IV: LOGIC GAMES

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Game 1—Petworld (Q. 1-6) The Action: Immediately upon seeing “14 animals. . . in four separate cages,” you have to figure that your job will be to place the former in the latter—to carry out, in short, a grouping game of distribution. And so it turns out. We don’t at first know the impact of the information about the different types and numbers of animals, but your hunch might’ve been that in some way it impacts the placement. And that hunch turns out to be correct too. The Key Issues will be: 1) How many animals must or can be in each cage? 2) Which animals must, could, or cannot be caged with each other? Because of the unusually large number of entities (14) and the odd number breakdown of animal types (3/3/3/5), you might have wanted to save this game till later in the 35 minutes. Game 3, and especially Game 2, might have struck you as more appealing in terms of starting off the section. The Initial Setup: You’ll likely want to picture the four cages as small boxes or circles, and label them, and make a roster of the entities. Since the cages are capitalized already, perhaps using lower-case letters for the 14 animals makes sense. ggg W

hhh X

lll

sssss Y

Z

The Rules: 1) Rule 1 is best left till last. It’s too vague. “Two, four, or six per cage”? Let’s pass over that until we can make it more concrete. 2) This rule’s two clauses make it clear that wherever you find a gerbil (g) you will find at least one hamster (h), and vice versa. So right away, we see that g’s and h’s are linked. Consider the contrapositives here: If a cage lacks a hamster, then it cannot contain a gerbil. And if it lacks a gerbil, then it cannot contain a hamster. This cements the link even more. 3) gives us a similar link for lizards and snakes. It works, logically speaking, exactly as Rule 2 works. The presence of a lizard requires the presence of a snake, and vice versa; and if a cage lacks one, it must lack the other. 4) Finally, some concreteness. If neither Y nor Z contains a gerbil—remember to turn negatives into positives—then all the gerbils must go into cages W and X. You can note that under your drawn cages W and X: “All g’s.”

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5) Same as Rule 4, different terms. Since cages W and X fail to contain lizards, all the lizards will be found in cages Y and Z. So note that in your sketch of those cages: “All l’s.” Key Deductions: Rule 4 links up with Rule 2, and Rule 5 with Rule 3. Let’s take them step by step and in turn. There are no gerbils in cages Y and Z, but without a gerbil in a cage we cannot place a hamster there. Conclusion?: There can be no hamsters in cages Y and Z either. Therefore all of the hamsters and gerbils will be placed in cages W and X. Same deal with Rules 5 and 3. Cages W and X lack lizards, which means (Rule 3) those cages must lack snakes as well. Hence all the lizards and snakes will occupy cages Y and Z. Now, finally, Rule 1 can help us. No cage is empty, and the minimum number of creatures per cage is two. Well, given the interrelationships of the hamster/gerbil and lizard/snake pairs, we can include this much as minimum information:

W all gh

X all gh

Y all ls

Z all ls

g+h

g+h

l+s

l+s

What’s left? There’s one gerbil and one hamster left for cages W and X. They can’t be split between those cages (that’d make for 3 creatures per cage, a violation of Rule 1). So one of the cages will get the remaining g+h pair. The outcome is very neat: Of cages W and X, one will get just g+h, the other will get gghh. Things are slightly less neat for cages Y and Z. Four creatures (one lizard and three snakes; see above sketch) remain. They will have to be placed in cages Y and Z. But how? And in what numbers? Each cage contains its required one snake/one lizard minimum—all that’s prohibited is that a cage contain snakes only or lizards only. So those four remaining creatures can be placed in either cage Y or Z, as long as Rule 1’s number rules are followed. To be precise, either Y and Z will get 4 creatures apiece, or one will get 2 and the other 6.

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The Final Visualization: W all gh

X all gh

Y all ls

Z all ls

g+h

g+h

l+s

l+s

➚➚

➚➚

g+h

lsss

2/4/6 in each! The Big Picture: • As you start reading the opening ¶ of each game, be ready to make a snap decision: Is this a game worth doing now? Or one worth skipping till later? Factor in the number of entities, the game’s familiarity, the clarity and simplicity of the game’s action, the amount of reading the game requires, and the number of questions at stake. • Get out of the habit of working on the rules in the given order just because they’re printed that way. Seek out the most concrete and helpful rules, and work with them first. They’ll give you a solid foundation to build on. The Questions: 1. (A) As long as you consulted your sketches carefully and used the Kaplan method for this acceptability question, you should have been OK. (E) directly violates Rule 5 by giving lizards to cage W. Check the arithmetic (Rule 1): (B) is wrong to give a cage three animals, and (C) is wrong to give a cage five. Finally, look at the distribution: If cage Y gets three lizards (D), then it gets all the lizards, and that leaves cage Z with none. Can’t be: (D) would make it impossible to form a valid cage Z. (A) is correct by default. • Just because a question looks like it’s going to be easy, don’t assume that you can afford to rush and get careless. Low-difficulty questions like this one turn into goose-eggs when the examinee gets sloppy. 2. (D) The first if-clause is easier to deal with: If cage W gets two hamsters, then it must get two gerbils as well (to avoid violating Rule 1). That leaves a single gerbil and hamster for cage X—which, the stem goes on to tell us, has the same number of gerbils as cage Y has snakes. One! Cage Y gets a single snake, which means that all of the remaining snakes go into cage Z; five minus one is four, choice (D). • A “two-part” question stem must be treated the same way as a “two-part” rule: namely, in two parts. Don’t lump all the information together. Take it step by step, and always begin with the information that’s more concrete. © K A PL A N

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3. (C) The arithmetic here may be even easier than that of Q. 2. There are only three lizards to begin with, so the if-clause here must mean that Y has one lizard and Z two. (Note that that makes (A) wrong automatically.) The five snakes can be divvied up among cages Y and Z in several ways, as long as each cage contains at least one snake and an overall total of two, four, or six animals. (C) works fine: The two cages could indeed have four animals each— LSSS in Y, and LLSS in Z—so (C) is the statement that “can be true.” (B) Exactly two snakes + Y’s one lizard would result in three animals in cage Y, a violation of Rule 1. (D) has the same problem as (B): If we add exactly three snakes to the two lizards that we determined must be in Z (in order to satisfy the stem), we end up with an odd number of critters in both Y and Z, in violation of Rule 1. (E) Given the stem, Z has to have two lizards to Y’s one, and Z needs snakes beyond that. So (E) is impossible. • Create a separate sketch for questions like this. Recopy the “master sketch” and include the question’s new data. Doing so will take much less time and avoid error. 4. (D) Looking at the master sketch, if W and Z are to get the same number of animals, that number must be two or four—and if you sketch the two possibilities out briefly, it may make the work go quicker. If W and Z each get two, then each of them gets its minimum allotment of a gerbil and hamster for W and a lizard and snake for Z, leaving X and Y with all of the remains. If W and Z each get four, then W gets two gerbils and two hamsters, while Z gets some combination of lizards and snakes equaling four. Your best bet is to check each choice against these possible arrangements: (A), (B) A glance at our master sketch reveals that there are only six animals total (3g, 3h) to be split between cages W and X. If either cage got all six, then the other would be left with zero, in violation of Rule 1. (C) In option 1 above, Y gets four snakes, and in option 2, Y gets at least two snakes. Exactly one snake for Y is therefore not an option. (D) works: Y could get a lizard and three snakes, with Z getting two of each (and W getting its four animals). On test day you need look no further, but for the record: (E) In option 1, Z has just one snake, and in option 2, Z gets at most three snakes. • Sometimes you have to work out two possible scenarios, but you’ll find it doesn’t take too long if you don’t hesitate. In the time you spend trying to figure it all out in your head, you may as well jot down the possibilities. When you’re done, it’s simply a matter of comparing the choices to your scratchwork.

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5. (E) Cage Y’s six animals would have to include the LS pair that’s always there, and the four remaining animals, giving us LLSSSS in Y, and LS in Z. (E) is therefore correct—exactly one of each type is present in Z. (D) is flat wrong, and so is (C): Z gets only one snake. All of this distribution, of course, has no impact on cages W and X. In point of fact either (A) or (B) has to be true and the other false, but we can’t tell which is which, and the Y/Z situation doesn’t help any. • Don’t stray from all the work you did in constructing your Final Visualization. We do all that work up front for a reason—it allows us to hit the ground running on questions like this. Six animals in Y, you say? A glance at our master sketch tells us that the breakdown has to be LLSSSS in Y and LS in Z, which leads directly to a quick point. 6. (D) As we just saw in the previous question, Y can contain four snakes and two lizards, leaving one snake and one lizard for Z. The maximum number of snakes for Y is 4, choice (D). • The testmakers don’t always save the most difficult questions of the game for last. Often, and especially in tough games like this one, they reward those who get to the final questions, possibly as a result of holding off on some of the earlier ones. Here, the final two questions were eminently doable, if you kept your wits about you— which, in this case, means simply consulting your master sketch and using your previous work.

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Game 2—Soda Rankings (Q. 7-12) The Action: The action here is revealed in the second sentence: The seven proposed soda names are ranked in terms of their popularity, from first to seventh. This is straightforward sequencing. The Key Issues will be: 1) Which names are more or less popular than which other names? 2) Which names must, can and cannot be ranked in each slot from first to last? The Initial Setup: Make a roster of the entities, but then look at the rules: Each one relates one or more entities to others. There are no rules such as “Nipi is ranked third or sixth”—in fact, only one rule directly relates to any entity’s position in the ranking, and that one negatively (“Nipi is not 7th”). What we have here is a loose sequence, also known as a “freefloating” sequence. So we don’t want to create a vertical or horizontal list of slots just yet; rather, we want to put the rules together en route. Let’s see how this happens, working with the most concrete rules first.

The Rules: 1) On the roster, Jazz is higher than Oboy. How much higher? No way to tell. They could be consecutive, or widely separated. To take note of this on the page (and to avoid throwing yourself mixed messages), jot down the J/O relationship kind of freely, something like this: J | O 2) Ordinarily we’d seek out another rule that ties in with what we already know. Here, the testmakers give us a break and throw it in right away: The same Oboy whom we just learned is outranked by Jazz, ranks higher than Kola. Therefore: J | O | K

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3) And now Rule 3 is obliging too. Since Kola ranks higher than Mist, we can be sure of the following: J | O | K | M —and voila, four of our seven are solidly ranked! 4) deals with Nipi, who hasn’t entered the relative ordering yet. Let’s postpone this one for now. 5) requires care. It’s complex, and if you blow it you can write the game off. Let’s take it one step at a time—and the best place to start is with any mention of the names we’ve already heard. For that reason, let’s start with the information that Ping got more votes than Oboy, since Oboy’s already in the picture. Jazz got more votes than Oboy as well. Who’s ranked higher, Jazz or Ping? Can’t tell yet, but we do know this: J \

P / O | K | M

Next: Now that Ping’s in the picture, we can incorporate the fact that Ping received fewer votes than Luck, but more than Nipi: L / J P \ / \ O N | K | M Back to Rule 4. Nipi doesn’t come in 7th. So who does? Everyone else, except for Mist, is ranked above one or more names. Therefore, it has to be true that Mist was the least popular name, #7 on our hit parade.

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Key Deductions: Well, we’ve already begun those, haven’t we, as we moved seamlessly into Step 4. (That’s how it happens with some games, notably loose sequences). In freefloating sequence games, we usually form a few deductions right off the bat simply by establishing the relationships on the page. For example, we weren’t explicitly told, but can deduce from our sketch, that Ping received more votes than Kola, and Luck more than Nipi, Oboy and Kola. There are others, of course, and they should all be clear from the relationships etched in the sketch. It’s also valuable to consider the game’s overall parameters, for instance noticing that there are two and ONLY two contenders for the #1 slot—Jazz and Luck—so I guess we’ll all be drinking Jazz or Luck sometime soon. Beyond that, all of the other names’ rankings are limited only by what we have learned so far, which means there’s still a lot of flexibility. The Final Visualization: We should be ready to redraw our sketch as needed, when new information arrives. But we should also be ready to get some quick points from what we’ve done so far, which is: L / J P \ / \ O N | K | 7th M == The Big Picture: • Before you draw a sketch for a sequence game, determine whether assembling a row or column of concrete slots makes sense. In a “loose” sequence game—one in which the rules relate the entities to each other—you’re better off building the relationships the way we did above. (In essence, what we did was to combine Steps 3 and 4 of the Kaplan Method. Ordinarily doing so is dangerous, but, as mentioned above, it usually works well for loose sequences.) • Most games of “ranking” are best sketched out vertically. • Take apart all multi-part rules, such as Rule 5 here, and treat them as separate pieces of information. That way you won’t run the risk of missing an important nuance. • Turn negative rules into positives by asking the right questions. When you’re told Nipi isn’t ranked 7th, two questions should immediately come to mind: “Who is ranked 7th?” And “Where is Nipi ranked?” By asking them and following them up, you can make Big Deductions . . . and rack up big points.

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The Questions: 7. (C) Ordinarily, in an Acceptability question, you should check each rule against the choices to seek the violators. Here it’s even easier, since we know we must see J--O--K--M in that rough order somewhere among the right answer, and (A) and (D) both violate that sequence, so they can go in one swoop. (B) violates Rule 4 (not to mention the fact that we deduced that Mist must be ranked 7th). And (E) reverses Rule 5’s requirement that Ping get fewer votes than Luck. As the only one left standing, (C) must be right. • Move swiftly in Acceptability questions to apply the Kaplan technique of comparing what you know to the choices, and throwing out the violators. 8. (E) (E)’s relationship is easily seen in the sketch or deducible like so: P gets more votes than O (Rule 5) and O gets more than K (Rule 2), hence . . . choice (E). (A), (B), (D) We cannot be sure of Nipi’s precise relationship to Jazz, Oboy, or Kola. These three statements are possibly true, but not necessarily so. (C) would be true if Luck is ranked #1. But if Jazz is ranked #1, then (C) is false. • Don’t jump into drawing a new sketch until you’re sure that you need one. Many questions, like this one, are manageable by just consulting your master sketch. 9. (C) You can sketch out the question stem like so: P O K Next you can add the things you already know—and remember, the stem mandates that “P O K” is an unbroken sequence: J L \ / P O K | M

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All that’s left is to add N, which ordinarily will rank somewhere below P (Rule 5) but not 7th (Rule 4). But here, since “P O K” is an unbroken sequence, we can be sure of: J L \ / P O K N M (A) is possibly true (if Jazz is ranked #1), while (B), (D), and (E) are all definitely true in this sequence. But (C) is false: Oboy must rank above Nipi here. • When a stem gives you concrete information—as this one does—jot down its gist. Then proceed to the overall rules and put it all together. 10. (A) We saw this up front: All we can be sure of is that Mist got the fewest votes. Perhaps you ran with this and chose (A) and immediately moved on to save time. Kudos if you did! If not, you probably double-checked to confirm that every other entity has at least two possible rankings. N’s ranking is unfixed relative to that of J, O, and K, so the exact position of these four names can’t be determined without more info. L can be first or second, while P could be second or third. Only M’s dead last ranking can be precisely determined from the partial results in the rules—choice (A). • An excellent example of how working out possibilities during your setup work can lead to quick and easy points during the game itself. 11. (B) We’ve already seen, in Qs. 7 and 9, that Luck, Ping, and Jazz can all rank among the top three, and we know from the setup that Mist must rank 7th. So all we need do here is figure out which of the remaining names—Kola, Nipi, and Oboy—could sneak into the top three. Kola cannot, because at least four other names (J, O, P, and L) rank higher. Oboy cannot, because at least three others rank higher (J, L, and P). But Nipi can, since it is only for-sure outranked by Luck and Ping; Nipi could rank 3rd. Final box score: Three names (M, K, O) cannot be among the top three; four can—choice (B). • In non-if questions, there’s no new material to incorporate into the arrangement. Instead, use your master sketch and previous work to narrow down the number of choices and/or entities that you need to test for the particular circumstance asked about in the stem (here, the names that could rank in the top three).

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12. (B) Create a new sketch here, putting P atop J. That means that L, always atop P, is now at the top of the list. It reads: L--P--J--O--K--M. But what about Nipi? As long as its rank is below Ping’s (Rule 5) and not last (Rule 4), it can take any position. So all we know for sure is that L is 1st, P 2nd, and M (as always) 7th. That’s three, choice (B). Positions 3 through 6 remain uncertain, because N can be inserted anywhere in this middle part of the ordering. • Use your pencil! The extra time you take to keep track of the possibilities will be rewarded. Sketch out the new relationships when the stem posits a new condition. The perils of trying to manipulate the master sketch in your head are legion: a possible waste of time; a likely loss of a point.

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Game 3—Park Benches (Q. 13-19) The Action: Nothing could be clearer than the simple opening sentence and accompanying sketch. We have to place the eight benches around the park, one for each of those large black dots. Peeking ahead at the first indented rule tells us that it’s a little more complicated than one bench/one spot—we have to consider the colors of the benches as well—but still and all, the overall task should be blazingly clear, as are the Key Issues: 1) Which benches must, cannot, or can be placed in a certain location? 2) What is the relationship of each bench color to the other colors in terms of placement? The Initial Setup: Indented Rule 1 comes into play here, of course. You want to make a roster of the entities, and perhaps you found a way to distinguish among the different colors. Often, when there are two types of entities we can get by with using caps and lowercase, but the problem of representing the third type here may have made the whole thing too complicated. For the sake of this explanation, we’ll simply keep them all in caps: GREEN: J K L RED: T U PINK: X Y Z The rules, of course, will determine how we execute the task: placing the 8 benches into the 8 slots. Many students choose to move to the most concrete rules first, and so shall we: The Rules: 5) places T in the lower right corner. Draw T there, and cross T off the master roster. 6) In the same way, we can place J where the rule indicates, right at the printed word “North.” Cross J off the roster too. 2) tells us that J, K, and L all stand adjacent to each other. Now that we have seen that J stands in the middle of the north edge, we know that K and L will stand nearby. But where? Too early to tell. Keep in mind, though, the JKL relationship. 3) is similar to Rule 2: The pink benches, namely X, Y, and Z, also have to be placed in three adjacent slots; though, again, we cannot know in what order. 4) is key. The green and pink benches can’t stand next to each other. So our 3 greens in a row cannot stand next to our 3 pinks in a row. What’s going to separate them? Has to be the red ones, no? In other words, we’re going to have to have a red bench, the three greens, then the other red, then the three pinks. There’s no other way. Check it out. Check out, too, how sometimes one is moved to proceed into Step 4 of the Kaplan Method before Step 3 (the work with the individual rules) is done.

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7) doesn’t help us very much, being highly conditional. If T and X are adjacent, then we cannot have T adjacent to L. Beyond that, we ought to think through and jot down the contrapositive (If we ever see TL, then we cannot have TX) and leave it go until it has to be brought into play. For now, there’s more to be done in Step 4. Key Deductions: We’ve seen that the red benches will be needed to separate our consecutive green and pink benches. Now we need to recall that one of those two red benches, T, stands in the southeast corner. It follows that to the left of ‘t’ will be one of our consecutive trios, either the greens or pinks, and to the right, the other consecutive trio. This leaves the northwest corner open, and one and only one red bench to fill it. It’s a huge deduction that bench U must stand in the northwest corner, and hopefully this was the deduction you made and incorporated right into the picture on the page. At the same time, J stands up there too. So we know (relatively) where the greens go, and hence where the pinks go. Be as definite as you can: U

J

X/Y/Z X/Y/Z

K/L K/L

X/Y/Z

T

And there you have it: The Final Visualization. Rule 7 now makes a bit more sense: If T stands next to X, the rule says, then L doesn’t stand next to T...which will mean that K does stand next to T, since that’s the only other contender. But again, that’s much more “what if” speculative work than we need to engage in. When Rule 7 comes into play, we’ll know it. Let’s first get some “gimmes.” The Big Picture: • Typically, the testmakers give us a picture when describing the situation in prose would be too wordy and confusing. Take advantage of any picture that the testmakers decide to provide: It does a lot of the work for you. • Turn all negative rules into positives. Based on what CANNOT be true, figure out what CAN or MUST be true. • Be guided every step of the way by the game’s action. Ask yourself with every rule at every moment: How can this help me execute the game’s action? Here, we want to ask ourselves constantly, “How can this help me place the benches?”

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The Questions: 13. (E) Our sketch makes clear that one of the two green benches K or L has to stand in the northeast corner. They chose the latter for correct choice (E). (A), (B), (C) As we deduced above and represented in the Final Visualization, these three pink benches have to occupy the bottom left corner of the square. (D) Rule 5 requires us to place T at the southeast corner. • “Gimmes” are ever present in Logic Games. Find ‘em and get ‘em! 14. (A) Since the four wrong choices are positively-true statements, it follows that the correct answer is either downright false, or only possibly true. We get the former in correct choice (A): As we deduced above, the bench in the northwest corner is red bench U. (B), (D) Yes, each of these benches is green: K and L in either order. (C), (E) Yes, these two benches, along with the middle bench on the south side, are all pink benches X, Y, and Z in some order. • Take the time throughout your Logic Games work to characterize each question’s answer choices (“What is true of the right answer?” “What must be therefore true of the wrong answers?”). This is time well spent. 15. (D) Ka-ching! The sketch instantly reveals our Big Deduction that U, in the northwest corner, stands next to J. Either K (A) or L (B) must stand on the other side of J in the northeast corner, but we cannot tell which. And T (C) and X (E) are safely separated from J. • A question like this—asking for something that MUST be true without providing any “if” information—is a good clue (if you need one) that there is at least one Big Deduction to be made during Step 4 of the Kaplan Method. 16. (A) Reading comprehension is the key here. We are asked for a bench that has exactly two possible locations: not one, as T (B) has, or three, as X, Y, and Z have (C), (D), and (E). As we’ve seen in the setup and again in Q. 13, K and L will occupy the two spots between J and T on the east side of the park, but we can’t be sure which stands where. And as with Q. 13, either K or L could’ve been chosen as the answer; this time they happen to have chosen K for correct choice (A).

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• When a stem is complex or lengthy, the worst thing you can do is take it for granted, rushing through it or reading it carelessly. Time spent thinking will pay off in a higher score. • Critical reading skills are essential not only in Logical Reasoning and Reading Comprehension, but here in Logic Games as well. Boil complicated phrases down as simply as possible: “. . . two and no more than two . . .” MEANS exactly two. 17. (D) Before you draw anything, take a look at the master sketch with this question’s if-clause in mind. We see where the three pink benches are: the southwest corner, and the spots on either side of it. How, then, can pink Z stand directly north of pink Y? Only one way: if Y stands at the southwest corner, and Z stands right above it. This leaves X for the middle of the south row, next to T...and if we are keeping an eye on the choices, we see that (D) is true. As the bench in the middle of the south row, X is in fact due south of J, the bench in the middle of the north row. If you didn’t stop to check the choices, there’s more work that can be done. Since T here stands next to X, L cannot; which in turn means that K must stand next to T, leaving L for the northeast corner. Many of the wrong choices hinge on all of that: (A) No, J is northwest of K. (B) No, K is southeast of U. (C) No, U is northwest of X. (E) No, Z is southwest of J. • Before you draw anything, look at your master sketch with each question’s new stem in mind. That thinking will guide your sketch, saving you time and avoiding missteps. 18. (B) Immediately draw your eight dots next to the question, enter Y where you’re told to, and recopy what you already know: U

J

Y X/Z

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X/Z

T

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We’re looking for a pair of benches that CANNOT stand in the corners, and notice that the only rule still up in the air is the last one. The big insight here is realizing that one of the choices must force a violation of Rule 7. And (B) certainly would: If Z and K are in the southwest and northeast corners, respectively, then we are left with X and L standing next to T—which is specifically prohibited by Rule 7. • Better to take a few extra seconds to recopy a new sketch for a question like this, than to do all the work in your head and risk wasting time and picking a wrong choice. • Good test-takers develop a sense of which rules are relevant when. Here, the key was to notice that once the entities were placed as in the sketch above, only Rule 7 remained. 19. (C) Check your master sketch for the possibilities for Y, L, and T. The only way for Y to simultaneously stand farther south than L and farther north than T is if their position is: .

.

Y .

L .

.

T

You can enter in the other data we know for sure: U in the northwest corner; J standing between U and L; now we know that K has to stand between L and T on the eastern side. The only uncertainty is between X and Z; there’s no danger of violating Rule 7 now that T and L are separated, so X and Z can take the two remaining spots in either order. As a result (C) is correct, since X CAN stand next to T but need not. All of the other choices are adjacent pairs. (Note, for (E), that no matter in which order we place X and Z, they’re still adjacent.) • You can start a new question’s sketch—as we did here—by working out, on paper, its specifics. Then build in what you already know.

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Game 4—Island Bridges (Q. 20-24) The Action: As the game begins, five islands are unconnected by bridges, but contractors are about to remedy that. In a way we are acting as surrogates for the bridge planners: We need to connect the bridges appropriately. Though this is a game situation you probably have not seen before, the Key Issues would seem to be pretty clear, namely: 1) Which islands must, can, or cannot be connected by bridge to which other islands? 2) How many bridges must, can, or cannot an island have? The Initial Setup: When a game mentions, or seems to hinge on, a map, you might as well draw one. Since we’re not told anything about the islands’ spatial relationship to each other, and that issue never comes up, it doesn’t matter exactly how you locate them; in this situation, most people tend to try setting the entities in a rough circle. Where to start? A sneak peek at the concrete Rule 7 might suggest that you locate J and M close to O. We can also throw K and L in to complete the circle, and move them elsewhere later on if necessary: J \ K L

O / M

(If you didn’t see this, or if some new information comes along, you can always redraw the arrangement—doing so won’t take long.) Anyway, connecting the letters by straight lines would seem adequate to indicate the bridges. The Rules: We’ve already taken care of Rule 7, and so can now fill in the other information around the tentative sketch above: 1) This rule is a loophole-closer—meaning a rule designed to define the setup and limit possibilities that common sense would otherwise leave open. Because of Rule 1, we know that every bridge connects just 2 islands (unlike, say, New York’s Triborough Bridge, which as its name indicates connects three bodies of land), and that no bridges intersect. 2) Another loophole closer. Students have always reported having trouble with this one. But the testmakers are trying to make things clear; maybe the best way to understand it is to try a concrete example or two. Suppose a bridge is built between M and O. Well, then, all the rule is there for is to prohibit any other M/O bridge: One bridge per pair of islands. That’s it! It means that any bridge that connects islands is a single bridge. Again, just a loophole closer meant to forestall any ambiguity in the numbers that govern the game.

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3) Not a loophole closer this time, but a concrete piece of information that guides the action: The maximum number of bridges that can be built to any one island is three. So each island will be connected to three islands maximum. Make a note of it. 4) is vague enough that we might profitably skip it for the moment, and move to more concrete rules. 5) “J has exactly two connections.” Well, one of them is established by Rule 7. So we need to link up J to one more island. Which one? No way to tell. Let’s just note it off to the side: (+ 1)

J \

K

O / L

M

6) “K gets just one bridge.” Fair enough. We don’t know which one it is, so an annotation will do for now: (+ 1)

J \

(1 only) K

O / L

M

4) Now back to 4: Of J, K, and L, each one has to link up to M or O or both. A THREE-part rule: Three rules in one. Well, we have a context for that fact now—namely, all the other things we’ve learned—so let’s explore this rule in Step 4 in the context of all the other information: Key Deductions: Starting with J in Rule 4: “J must be connected to M or O or both.” Well, that minimum requirement has been met (Rule 7): J is connected to O. So that’s all we can do with J and this rule. J’s other bridge could link J to M, but needn’t. “K is connected to M or O or both.” Well, K only gets one bridge, so Rule 4 tells us it has to be a K/M or K/O bridge. So our sketch can be adjusted to reflect that: (+ 1)

J \

(1 only, to M or O) K

O / L

M

(And you may wish to note that K/J and K/L bridges are therefore prohibited.)

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Continuing with Rule 4: “L is connected with M or O or both.” L is otherwise wide open; L could have a minimum of one bridge (L/M or L/O), or two, or the maximum of three. Anything else? We should notice that O, with 2 bridges already, can only have one more maximum; and that M, with 1 bridge already, can get zero, one, or two more. We should also notice that indeed every island has to have at least one bridge. That wasn’t spelled out as a rule, but proves to be true. The Final Visualization: (+ 1)

J \

(1 only, to M or O) K

3 MAXIMUM!!! O /

L

M

(M or O or both) The Big Picture: • There are always four basic questions that you have to ask and answer as a game begins: What’s the real-life situation? What are the entities? What’s the action? And what is the arithmetic—the restrictions on the action? These questions are especially important when, as here, the game and/or the situation are unfamiliar. The answers to these questions will take the game from the strange to the manageable. • Another key to getting an unfamiliar game under control is the making of mental pictures. See those islands and bridges in your mind’s eye. Make it make sense. And remember: The game must work; it wouldn’t be on the LSAT if it didn’t. • Feel free to peek ahead at the rules in your work on Step 2 of the Kaplan Method. If in this game you look ahead, for instance, and see that there’s nothing said about the physical relationship of the islands (e.g. which is north or south, number of miles between, etc.), you can more confidently construct a sketch. • Give yourself the freedom to attack the rules in the most helpful order. Establishing concrete relationships in the early going will help you to handle the more abstract rules by providing a foundation on which to build.

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The Questions: 20. (D) There will be no K/L connection, since K gets only one bridge connection (Rule 6) and that must be to M or O (Rule 4). But nothing stops L from being connected to J, O, and/or M. Any or all of them can link up with L—choice (D). • Every game has one or more “gimme” questions, and sometimes (as here) they start off the set of questions. Be ready to capitalize on this fact. 21. (C) Since the right answer CAN be true, it follows that the four wrong choices are impossible. This is a variation of the standard “acceptability” question. You can check each rule against the choices, or simply test each choice against the master sketch above. Either way, you should see rather readily that (C) is acceptable (L can have J and M connections with no damage to the rules) and that: (A) Since J is already connected with O, connecting J with L and M would be a total of three bridges, violating Rule 5. (B) Since K only gets one connection (Rule 6), (B) is a blatant violation. (D) Since M is already connected with O, adding (D)’s connections would give M a total of four bridges, violating Rule 3. (E) Since O is already connected with J, (E) would give O a total of four bridges. Again, a violation of Rule 3. • Some students prefer to postpone a question this vague until later in the game, figuring that it’ll be easier once they learn more about how the game works. Not a bad strategy. But sometimes a “could be true” question is much like an acceptability question in disguise. 22. (B) Creating a new sketch for this question is advisable. In it, repeat the connections we’re sure of (J/O and M/O), and add the new K/O bridge. Two things should now be immediately apparent: (1) That’s it for K, which has the one connection permitted it by Rule 6. (2) That’s also it for O, which has its total of three connecting bridges permitted by Rule 3. L’s the only island not yet hooked up—and all that’s left are J and M. L will have to link up M (Rule 4), and could link up with J as well. Now look through the choices for a possible statement. (A) Impossible. Not establishing an L/M bridge, with O unavailable to hook up with L, violates Rule 4. (B) Possible, as noted above. There’s our answer.

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(C) Impossible. O’s quota is reached with connections to J, K, and M. (D) Impossible. L has a maximum of two connections (J and M) here. (E) Impossible. O, as we’ve seen, has three bridge connections—two from Rule 7, and one from the question stem. • Every word in a Logic Games stem can have import. If you miss the simple word “could” here, you can waste lots of time and even get the question wrong. Don’t rush your analysis of the stems. 23. (B) The stem is very concrete. Create a new sketch with the new and old information represented. You see that O has reached its limit (J, L, M = three bridges) and that K is still unconnected by any bridges. That won’t do; and since Rule 4 dictates that K be connected with either O or M, and O is once again maxed out, there’s no way around it—K must link up with M, choice (B). (A) and (E) are both impossible: Since M must link with K here, M now has three connections—K (see above), L (from the stem), and O (Rule 7). So (E) is dead wrong—M has three, not two connections; and (A) is impossible, since M is now maxed out and therefore cannot connect with J. (C) is impossible, since O’s limit of three bridges has already been reached through J, L, and M. As described above, this is the fact that forces the KM connection, and hence correct choice (B). (D) turns out to be impossible as well: If we follow this scenario through to the bitter end, we see that J’s required second connection (Rule 5) must be with L, what with K, O, and M each connected to the max. So J must connect to L, which means that L now has three connections itself (including the two in the stem), not two as (D) would have it. • When you spot a deduction, scan for it among the choices. If it’s there, circle it and move on to save time. Your job in Logic Games is not to fully disprove all the wrong choices once you’ve found an answer that works. Remember: Correct answers in LG are objectively correct; when you’ve found one, have the confidence to blow off the rest.

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LSAT PREP _______________________________________________________________ LSAT Test VI Explained: Section IV

24. (A) This stem is more of a critical reading challenge than anything else. We are forbidden, in essence, to connect any island with both M and O. Anything jump out at you at this point? Hopefully, you said to yourself “hey, J is already connected to O, so we can’t have JM.” Following this line of thought, we see that since J can never connect to K—K gets only one bridge and that one has to be with M or O—and J needs two connections to satisfy Rule 5, J must connect to L. Voila, choice (A). (B) Impossible. O and J are already connected by a bridge; (B) would violate the question stem. (C) is possible but not necessarily true, since K’s one bridge could be built to M just as readily as to O. (D), (E) L needs a bridge connection with M or O (Rule 4) and cannot be connected with both (according to the stem). But which bridge is built? We cannot be sure. • A hallmark of high-difficulty Logic Games questions is that they involve many of the rules simultaneously. Make it a goal to become adept at using the clues in the stem to lead you to the most relevant rules first. Part of Logic Games success is having a good sense of what rules are put into play at what point. If you develop a good feel for this, you won’t find yourself hesitating as much about where to start, or where to go next.

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