Identifying the Sufficient and Necessary Conditions in this example

[hyperfang9000]

Hello!

Can someone help me identify the sufficient and necessary conditions in this example, and how you could tell (i.e., what indicators you used)? "Jenny will have lots of balloons at her birthday party." It comes from a Parallel Reasoning question in which conditionality is present.

[ashleyroos]

"Jenny will have lots of balloons at her birthday party."

The indicator here is the word "will," which serves as a necessary condition indicator. It seems that the sentence may need to be shuffled around a bit, however. To put it into "if...then..." form: "if Jenny has a birthday party, it will have lots of balloons."


The word "will" is very matter-of-fact, brooking no room for doubt, implying that there must be balloons at Jenny's birthday party, or else it is not really her birthday party. I am not an expert, and I am currently studying for the LSAT myself, so I could be wrong, but this is how I think it works.

[hyperfang9000]

Thank you!!

[ashleyroos]

Of course!

[Jeff Wren]

Hi hyperfang,

Just to be clear, the sentence “Jenny will have lots of balloons at her birthday party” isn’t actually a conditional statement. It is a declarative statement of fact that happens to be in the future tense. In the same way, the statement, “Washington D.C. is the capital of the United States” is not actually conditional.

Of course, it is possible to convert absolute/certain facts such as these into conditional statements, such as “If one is in Washington D.C., then one is in the capital of the United States.”

The reason that I mention this distinction is that some students start turning every sentence into conditional statements once they learn conditional reasoning, which would be a mistake.

For example, someone states, “It’s hot today” and some LSAT students immediately think “If today, then hot.”

To be clear though, the question that you referenced (which originally appeared on the June 1999 LSAT) definitely involved conditioning reasoning, so it would be appropriate to think of this statement in conditional terms to analyze that answer choice.