Hi MillsV!
Happy to address this question. Without walking through the entire setup for the game (a stacked, linear game with a base numbered 1 through 5), this question involves looking at a particular restriction imposed by the first and second rules in the game:
J
K
L
and
T
V
W
Based on these two rules, there is only one position in which L and T could potentially be together (for the same reason that there could only be one place where J and W could be together)--the third slot:
J K L __ __
__ __ T V W
However, this foundation runs into a problem. The final rule of the game tells us that we have a vertical O-Z block, but there is no room for it in the above diagram. That is, L and T can never be together (nor could J and W for the same reason). This is reflected in answer choice (C).
More broadly, one can apply some strategies on cannot be true questions. In seeking to keep the time it takes to identify the right answer as low as possible, it would seem unlikely that a random variable would be the right answer. This is because such a variable has no constraints on it, so there'd need to be a clear reason from the game as to why something could not be true about that variable. Strategically, this could be a good reason to eliminate any answer choices on such a question that use the random variable. Here, that doesn't help, since all of the variables are used in one of the rules.
This also tells us, though, that the game is fairly restricted in terms of where the variables can go. Here, the variables L, J, W, and T all lead to the inference of two not-laws (e.g., L cannot be in slots 1 or 2, T cannot be in slots 4 or 5). The other rules do not similarly lead to such inferences in the original diagram. Any answer choices mentioning these variables would seem to be good contenders, therefore, for a cannot be true question. What is more, the possibilities would be even more restricted if these J
K
L and T
V
W rules were collapsed together, which is what (C) attempts to do.
