#10 - Famous personalities found guilty of many types of

[lunsandy]

Besides the numerical fallacy, can we also eliminate B because of "should"? Should refers to a opinion statement, but our stimulus here is a statement of fact.

[Francis O'Rourke]

Hi Lunsandy,

I would agree that we can rule out answer choice (B) because it jumps to a "should" or prescriptive conclusion from a mere set of facts.

[Nlopez18]

Hello,



Can you please elaborate on why the answer cannot be "A". In what ways does it go too far ?

- What type of answer ("prephrase") should I be looking for after reading this stimulus ?


Thank you,

[Claire Horan]

Hi Nlopez18,

(A) is incorrect because of the phrase "only a few types of criminal trials" at the end of the sentence. We can conclude from that stimulus a prephrase like: For "many types of crimes," defendants are not sentenced in accordance with the "principle of equality before the law." But that doesn't mean that there are "only a few types of criminal trials" where people are treated equally. You can have many types where the principle is violated AND many types where it is not violated.

In general, a helpful tip is to be very careful not to confuse words like "many," "few," and "some" (which don't tell you anything about proportion/percentage) with words like "most" (which tells you something about the percentage but nothing about the actual number in a group).

I hope this helps!

[EmilyC]

Hi Powerscore,

I know exactly why I got this question wrong. In the stimulus, the second sentence "however, the principle of equality before the law rules out using fame and publicity as relevant considerations in the sentencing of convicted criminals". I took that statement as truth, because it's in the stimulus and I guess I thought it was a classic flawed argument stimulus. We are given a fact in the first sentence, and then it's contradicted in the second. I chose answer B because if the stimulus is true, shouldn't an equal amount of celebrities and non celebrities be sentenced to community service? If the principle of equality before the law is true?

I can see why D is the correct choice, but I can't see how I completely misinterpreted the stimulus, or maybe I misinterpreted answer choice B?

Any advice? Thanks!

[James Finch]

Hi Emily,

The stimulus is written in such a way as to imply that because rich and famous convicts receive disproportionately lenient sentences for convictions for similar crimes, the principle of equality before the law is being violated or at least not applied. ("Principle" being the key word here). There is no conclusion given; we are being asked to infer this, as this is a Most Strongly Supported question, so it will be used as my Prephrase when testing the answer choices. With those question types, always take a little extra time to make sure you have the best possible Prephrase, as it will help you immensely when it comes to the answer choices.

(B) fails in that it uses the term "number," which means literally raw number, not proportion. By commonsense assumption, we can say that there probably are far fewer rich and famous defendants than those that aren't, so having "equal numbers" sentenced to any specific penalty would still be disproportionate (unless the number were zero). Raw number versus ratio is a common idea on the LSAT, so always be wary of specific language used whenever dealing with those two concepts.

(D) comes very close to the Prephrase I mentioned above, including the idea of the violation of the principle of equality before the law. None of the other answer choices capture the same meaning as the Prephrase, thus this is the correct answer choice.

Hope this clears things up!