Family Types

[dimi.wassef@yahoo.com]

Hello,

I had a question regarding family types. I know there is the Unless, Until, Without, Except equation-- are there any other families of indicator words I need to be aware of?

Also, my second question is about the terms Balanced/Unbalanced, Overloaded/Underfunded, Moving/Fixed-- am I missing any?

In Lesson 6 homework I came across an answer to what I believe was a Paradox question but I'm not sure. In the explanation it said beware of answers that summarize but don't answer the question (?). Do you know what I might be referring to?

Thank you!

-Dimi

[Adam Tyson]

Hi Dimi! Those indicator words you listed don't actually identify what we would call a "Family" of questions. When we talk about Families, we are talking about the relationship of the stimulus to the answer choices. For example, questions that fall into the "Prove" family will be those in which the stimulus provides all the facts that we need to prove the correct answer. The stimulus proves the answer; the flow of information is downward, from the stimulus to the answer choice, and the stimulus supports the right answer.

Instead, those words all indicate a particular type of relationship involving Conditional Reasoning, which is reasoning based on statements that boil down to "if this, then that." Those are all special ones that indicate Necessary Conditions (the "then" portion of those conditional relationships) and which trigger an extra step of negating the other condition to create the sufficient condition (the "if" portion). Those relationships can exist within questions that fall into any of the four Families we discuss in our materials. They show up in questions in the Prove family, but also in the Help Family and the Disprove Family, and sometimes even in the Hurt Family (Weaken questions).

There are a lot of other things you should be looking for in the language of the LSAT, including Causal language, and discussions of Numbers and Percentages, indications of similarity or comparison, and words that indicate relative vs absolute relationships ("Good" is an absolute claim, while "Better" is a relative claim, for example). There's a lot to learn and to memorize, and we hope you'll find our resources, like the Logical Reasoning Bible, to be very helpful!

There's much more to games than just those terms you listed, and our Logic Games Bible will help you learn them. Those terms describe aspects of Grouping games and also games that combine Grouping and Linearity.

Lesson 6 wasn't likely to be looking at any Paradox questions, but what you are describing sounds to me like a discussion of wrong answers in Reading Comp questions, where an answer choice will often be a true statement about something in the passage but still fails to answer the question that was asked. Make sure that the answer addresses what you were asked in the question stem! Being true isn't always enough!