LSAT and Law School Admissions Forum

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 Administrator
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#31768
Please post below with any questions!
 wilsonc
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#32373
Hi Powerscore,

Could you show how to diagram this problem? The double negative on "nothing that is unworthy of serious study" is confusing.

--Christine
 Kristina Moen
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#32394
Hi Christine,

Welcome to the Forum! I'll diagram this stimulus.

"To be a literary classic a book must reveal something significant about the human condition." The word "must" is a Necessary Condition Indicator. We diagram this as:
Lit Classic :arrow: Reveals something significant

"Nothing that is unworthy of serious study reveals anything significant about the human condition." Here, the word "nothing" tells us that there is no overlap between the two groups. They are mutually exclusive. Imagine if I said "No dogs are cats." That means that the two groups are mutually exclusive. We diagram this as:
Unworthy of study :dblline: Reveals something significant

We have some common conditions! So we can put them together as:
Lit Classic :arrow: Reveals something significant :dblline: Unworthy of study
So let's follow the chain relationship to Lit Classic :dblline: Unworthy of study

Answer choice (B) can be diagrammed as:
Lit classic :arrow: Worth of study. That's the same as our chain relationship. You can't be in both groups of Lit Classic and Unworthy of Study. So to be a Lit Classic, you must NOT be in the group Unworthy of Study (thus, you must be in the group Worthy of Study!).

Hope that helps.
 sodomojo
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#39457
Kristina Moen wrote:Answer choice (B) can be diagrammed as:
Lit classic :arrow: Worth of study. That's the same as our chain relationship. You can't be in both groups of Lit Classic and Unworthy of Study. So to be a Lit Classic, you must NOT be in the group Unworthy of Study (thus, you must be in the group Worthy of Study!).
Linking up the conditional logic wasn't a problem for me. But I hesitated slightly with the contrapositive of Unworthy of Study :arrow: ~Significant human condition.

Is not unworthy of study the exact same thing as worthy of study? Wouldn't calling worthy of study the negation be the polar opposite as opposed to the logical opposite? Maybe I'm just tired and confused, it's late lol...
 James Finch
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#39636
Hi sodomojo,

This sentence is tough to parse because the wording is unusual, using the double negative construction. However, the negatives actually refer to two different things--"nothing" refers to group size (quantitative), while "unworthy of" is a characteristic (qualitative). So saying "nothing that is unworthy of X" is like saying "none of the things that lack X."

The clearest way for me to diagram the second conditional given in the stimulus is:

Worthy of Serious Study (WSS) :arrow: Reveals Something Significant (RSHC)

And the contrapositive:

RHSC :arrow: WSS

Hope this makes it clearer!
 gcs4v333
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#59895
I tried to simplify the language in the second sentence by making it a positive statement. So instead of:

Unworthy of Serious Study :dblline: Reveals Anything Significant About the Human Condition

I had:

Worthy of Serious Study :arrow: Reveals Something Significant About the Human Condition.

So my two diagrams were:

LC :arrow: HC
WS :arrow: HC

And then couldn't think of a way to link them up. Now that I've read the explanations, I understand why y'all diagrammed it the way you did. So is my instinct to simplify the language a bit incorrect? Or did I just poorly execute it? How could I have seen that it was a negative grouping? When I see "nothing" and "unworthy" my first instinct is to use negations, not to use " :dblline: "
 Malila Robinson
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#59951
Hi gcs4v333,
Simplifying the language is an excellent approach to a confusing stimulus, but at the same time, since it is a confusing stimulus, you then have to be particularly careful to ensure that you are diagramming it correctly. It sounds like your attempted simplification ended up being a mistaken negation. Again, this seems to have happened because of the difficulty in the language within the stimulus, rather than because you are likely to repeatedly do something wrong. What you may want to do is recheck your understanding of conditional reasoning to make sure that you do in fact understand the basic concept, and if you do then you may want to try to focus your practice on conditional reasoning questions that have been marked as difficult to ensure that you can expand your understanding of conditional reasoning to tricky scenarios with some amount of consistency.

**The previous explanation by James Finch does an excellent job of breaking down the confusing language, and explains why the stimulus is confusing.
Hope that helps!
-Malila
 ShannonOh22
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#68135
Hi guys - can someone please provide a full explanation of each answer choice and why they are wrong?
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 KelseyWoods
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#68562
Hi Shannon!

Must Be True-SN. The correct answer choice is (B).

Previous instructors already did a great job of explaining the diagram for this stimulus so I'll just sum up what they had here for reference when explaining the answer choices.

Sentence 1: Literary classic :arrow: Reveal something significant
Sentence 2: Worthy of serious study :arrow: Reveal something significant

Couple of notes here:

1) "Unworthy of serious study" can be on your diagram as stated or with a slash through "Worthy of serious study".
Unworthy of serious study = Worthy of serious study

2) The wording of the 2nd sentence is tricky because of the use of the term "nothing." Think about a similar, simplified phrase: "Nothing that is A does B." If I were to diagram that statement, it would look like this:
A :arrow: B
Basically, it's stating that if you have characteristic A, you don't do B, because nothing with characteristic A does B.

It's the same thing here. Nothing that is unworthy of serious study reveals anything significant about the human condition is the same as saying that if you are unworthy of serious study, you don't reveal anything significant about the human condition. Because nothing in the group "unworthy of serious study" "reveals anything significant about the human condition."

Prephrase: we are trying to determine something that must be true based on the 2 conditional statements that we have. In a MBT question with conditional reasoning, we look for contrapositives and links between multiple conditional statements. We can link our 2 statements based on the common condition "Reveal something significant" if we take the contrapositive of our 2nd sentence:

Sentence 1: Literary classic :arrow: Reveal something significant
Contrapositive of sentence 2: Reveal something significant :arrow: Worthy of serious study
Chain and contrapositive chain:
Literary classic :arrow: Reveal something significant :arrow: Worthy of serious study
Worthy of serious study :arrow: Reveal something significant :arrow: Literary classic


Every relationship going forward along our chain and our contrapositive chain are relationships that MBT so we are looking for an answer choice that describes any one of those.

Answer choice (A): This answer choice says that if a book is worthy of serious study, then it is a literary classic. This goes backwards along our original chain and so it is a Mistaken Reversal (Worthy of serious study :arrow: Literary classic). (Diagramming Note: "Any" is a sufficient indicator.)

Answer choice (B): This is the correct answer choice. It accurately describes a relationship that must be true in our original chain, if we remove the middleman about revealing something significant (Literary classic :arrow: Worthy of serious study). (Diagramming Note: "only if" is a necessary indicator.)

Answer choice (C): This answer choice directly contradicts one of the must be true relationships in our original chain and so it is something that cannot be true (Literary classic :arrow: Worthy of serious study). (Diagramming Note: If "no literary classics are worthy of serious study", that is the same thing as saying that if you are a literary classic, you are not worthy of serious study.)

Answer choice (D): This answer choice goes backwards along our original chain. Therefore, it is something that could be true, but not something that we can prove must be true (Worthy of serious study :some: Reveal something significant).

Answer choice (E): This answer choice is similar to answer choice (D). It goes backwards along our original chain and is, therefore, something that could be true, but not something that must be true (Reveal something significant :some: Literary classic).

Hope this helps!

Best,
Kelsey

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