#17 - Traditional hatcheries raise fish in featureless

[Rachael Wilkenfeld]

Exactly, Dave. From a test writer's perspective, the potential alternate reads are a feature of the stimulus, not a bug. We see these sorts of complexities all over the exam. Double negatives, awkwardly written answer choices, and more add to the difficulty of the exam. We often can figure out the reasoning or the prephrase for a question, but the answer choices aren't written in a way to match those thoughts. If you have to check multiple possible reads, even if you see both immediately, it will slow you down. Even more so if you don't see both right away.

Keep up the great work!

[attorneyatpaw]

Boston,

Reading through the stimulus, my reaction was that being bold might get you eaten (prematurely). That would have been a more fun answer. Alas, it was not to be.

Here is the short answer, followed by a longer answer in case I misinterpreted you.

If you got the correct negation of (C) as "No fish die from being too timid in foraging for food" but still believed this did not defeat the argument, please take a look at the conclusion. If food is not a factor in survival, the argument that being more adventurous in trying new food is helpful to survival has been disproved.

If that isn't enough, see the following:


(C) was still the stand-out selectable choice.

(A) About fish surviving, not economics...off topic.
(B) About what is best preparation for any environment, so the argument doesn't assume that environment is irrelevant. Contrary to stimulus, and wrong.
(C) survives--discussion to follow
(D) survives (barely)--discussion to follow
(E) Stimulus is about likelihood, not about what "always" happens. Among other reasons, eliminate this.

The reason I say that (D) barely survives is that the stimulus is just about willingness to try new food, not about having a varied diet. So I eliminated it, personally, right away. Because it could survive, I kept it for the negation test.

Negations follow:

(C) No fish die from being too timid in foraging for food.
(D) Fish don't need multiple types of food to survive.

In negation, (C) would destroy the argument because it indicates that a lack of boldness is unimportant to survival. (D) doesn't hurt the argument, which makes claims about finding food, not about having access to many different types of food.

Reading over your question, I think that what happened is that your negation was off. The logical negation of "some" is "none." If you tried to negate a different part of (C), the problem is that with "some" qualifying the whole of (C), you aren't achieving logical negation. So the target, and the only target, for the negation technique is to change the "some" to "none."

So if I'm to understand this correctly, the reason answer choice D is incorrect lies in the distinction between "new types of food" (stimulus), and "different types of food" (answer choice D)? If answer choice D had instead read, "Hatchery-raised fish that are released into the wild need to try new types of food to survive," would it be the correct answer?

Also for what it's worth, I eliminated answer choice C because I got spooked by the phrase "too timid." I suppose "too timid" and "not bold" are indeed synonymous, but I feel like the LSAT fosters a level of paranoia that makes me doubt my ability to detect subtle changes in wording (i.e. the above scenario!!!). That wasn't a question, just a rant

Thanks!

[Robert Carroll]

attorneyatpaw,

The issue with answer choice (D) is all about its strength. This is an Assumption question. While the argument needs suboptimal access to food to be a reason some fish don't survive, it doesn't need to go so far as to say that fish need many types of food to survive.

I totally understand your comment about answer choice (C). I think when doing the LSAT for a long enough time, it gets easy to overcorrect, and instead of being too forgiving of shifts in language (like many students are when they start studying), you can get too picky over things that aren't actually different in meaning. The test makers seem to know this, so they purposely use a different (but synonymous) word sometimes just to make a correct answer look unattractive.

Amazing username and avatar, by the way!

Robert Carroll