#22 - Educator: Environmental factors clearly have little

[Administrator]

Please post your questions below! Thank you!

[LSATrat99]

Is the answer suggesting that changes in time and changes in society create changed environments? This seems like a far stretch. I chose B because it goes against the author's claim that family and team sports are largely ineffective for participation.

[James Finch]

Hi LSAT Rat,

This is one of the very tricky Weaken questions that tend to come up at the end of an LR section. This stimulus is trying to prove that there is no causal connection between environment and likelihood of teenagers to participate in sports. As a Weaken question, this means we have to actually strengthen the causal linkage between environment and teenage sports, so the correct answer choice here must show this link in some form, however slightly.
Answer choice (D) does this by giving some, very slight, counterevidence to the idea that environmental factors play no role in teenage sports; if the participation rate varies widely across societies and time periods, then that implies that different societal environments do play a role, even if family or school environments do not. Essentially, the stimulus has shown two potential environmental factors to have no effect, and uses this to claim that no environmental factor has an effect; (D) brings in two more potential environmental factors, time and society, that seem to possibly be having an effect.

(B) actually tends to strengthen the stimulus by showing another instance where family environment seems to have no effect on whether a teen participates in sports, this time when parents are less enthusiastic than the teens are, rather than comparing multiple teens in a family. There are also some hints as to (B) being incorrect: the very vague scope of "some," the teenagers being "more enthusiastic than their parents" at participating in sports (but not necessarily actually enthusiastic enough to participate).

Hope this clears things up!

[claudiagarin]

Hi there,

Could someone clarify why A is wrong? Does it strengthen the argument?

I don't understand why D is the correct AC

Thank you!

[momgoingbacktoschool]

Hi there,

Could someone clarify why A is wrong? Does it strengthen the argument?

I don't understand why D is the correct AC

Thank you!

The conclusion in the stimulus says " Environmental factors clearly have little effect on whether a teenager will participate in sports." and answer A is saying (paraphrase) this other genetic factor could be why some teenagers do and don't participate. Not weakening or strengthening but just introducing a different factor that is genetic (this is important) as to why they may not participate. Had the reason in this answer been an environmental factor vs a genetic factor then I think it would have been correct.

[Adam Tyson]

Thanks for the assist, Mom! I would add that the variability in athletic ability might be genetic or might be environmental, so we simply cannot know whether this information is helpful or hurtful to the argument. We need more information about what causes that variability before we can know what impact it has on the argument.

[theamazingrace]

I chose C because if adults' enthusiasm for participating in sports is generally directly proportional to the extent to which they participated in sports when they were younger would that not show that there was an environmental factor when they were teenagers reflecting their adult behaviour?

Thanks

[Robert Carroll]

Grace,

There is simply no way to tell what factor was causing those adults in answer choice (C) to participate in sports (or not) when they were younger. To show that the enthusiasm is proportional to something is to show a correlation. But that correlation may not be causal. And even if it were causal, what is the underlying cause of that adult enthusiasm? Environmental factors that made them participate in sports as children? What about non-environmental factors when they were younger? Answer choice (C) seems perfectly compatible with a view on which younger participation was caused by non-environmental factors - in other words, answer choice (C) seems perfectly compatible with the author's argument. So it does nothing to weaken it.

Robert Carroll

[German.Steel]

Credit to the LSAT writers for devising one of the toughest questions of all time. They got me big-time, and I don't usually get got!

(A) appealed to me because it seemed to be restoring credibility to the possibility that family does, in fact, have an influence. My thought process was something like, "it's not that family has no impact; it just depends on talent to some degree, as to which children are encouraged by their parents to play sports." Of course, in retrospect, the problem here is that what that actually suggests is an explanation based on talent/innate ability, NOT an environmental one. The notion of "parents encouraging their more athletic children to play sports" is just an unjustified assumption I'm pulling out of my hindquarters.

I'm not super comfortable with (D) being a good weakener but it does cast some doubt on the (very strongly stated) conclusion that "environmental factors CLEARLY HAVE LITTLE EFFECT...".

I suppose the takeaway here is to give the benefit of the doubt to closely scrutinizing any answer choice that has strong/powerful language, on a question that fits the mold for strong/powerful correct answers (as weaken questions do). Had I examined (D) more carefully, I may have compared it more closely to (A) and eventually understood why (A) doesn't really work.

Tricky stuff.

[Adam Tyson]

Indeed, German.Steel! The test makers have been trending in this direction for a while now with causal weaken questions, giving us more and more of these types of answers that are less direct in offering an alternate cause or the cause without the effect, for example. These modern, challenging answers tend to be less powerful attacks and more subtle suggestions of possible conflicting data. And at least one recent causal strengthen question was based on showing that a previously unmentioned other known effect of a purported cause was present, supporting the claim that the cause was present. (I won't give away which one that was). That suggests yet another way we might see them weakening a causal argument on a future test: showing that the purported cause, if it had occurred, would have had some other effect which did not occur. The absence of another known effect of the alleged cause would weaken a claim that the cause had occurred!

They are very good at finding new ways to challenge us, so we have to keep adapting to them, like the Borg taking phaser fire!