#24 - Trade official: Country X deserves economic

[Jeremy Press]

Hi na02,

In order for answer choice C to be a principle assumed by the argument, we'd need to word it as follows: "We should not always jeopardize the interests of our people to punish a protectionist country."

The negated form of that principle would be: "We should always jeopardize the interests of our people to punish a protectionist country." That negated form of the principle would destroy the conclusion of the argument, because it would suggest that punishing a protectionist country always takes precedence over the interests of the people. But the conclusion clearly wants the country to put the interests of the people (the demand for agricultural imports that selling X the equipment will allow for) above the punishment of the protectionist country X (that it could dish out by not selling it equipment).

For assumption answer choices that utilize "time" terms, remember these rules of logical opposites: the logical opposite ("logical negation") of "always" is "not always." The logical opposite of "sometimes" is "never."

I hope this helps!

Jeremy

[ericj_williams]

Okay, you really got me thinking on this one, and I think you and I are both making this more complicated than it needs to be. Let's go with the simplest approach. We can negate answer choice E by just adding a "not" - "we should not balance the justice of an action... ." That destroys the conclusion pretty nicely, and so must be an assumption of the argument. If we do a simple negation of choice C we get "We should sometimes jeopardize the interests... ." (logical opposition rather than polar works better here). What does that statement do to our conclusion? Nothing, because the author argued only about "in this case". So maybe sometimes we should jeopardize are interests, but what about in this case?

Sorry if I led you down a long and winding path on this one. Sometimes it helps to step back and start over with the simplest approach. I'm glad you kept pushing me on it - I wasn't all that happy with my first answer, and it took a while for me to figure out why.

Thanks, and good luck!

Adam

So I don't like that E uses the word balance. If it had said compare, I could get on board with it. But when you balance something, you generally make it equal. If it's not equal, is it balanced? I feel pretty confident that the common person refers to something being balanced as it being equal, like a balance beam in science class.

How are we okay with balance when we don't know the relative strength of the qualities being compared? Again, if you said compare, contrast, something like that, I would get it. But balance?

I picked C.

If you never jeopardize your the interests of your people (their demand for agricultural products), then we have an overriding circumstance. So we should sell to them.

[Dave Killoran]

How are we okay with balance when we don't know the relative strength of the qualities being compared? Again, if you said compare, contrast, something like that, I would get it. But balance?

For better or worse, we're ok with it because we have no choice but to be ok with it In this case, we know this is the right answer, so to me the better question is, "Why is LSAC ok with this?" If we start there, then we get some insight into how they think. And in this case, they believe "balance" is a reasonable description of trying to weigh economic retribution vs self-interest and make them work, which is the sort of compare/contrast/measuring idea you prefer. And, if it helps, I wouldn't object if they used "compare" instead, that would work for me too.

Side note: they don't much care what the "common person" thinks about the meaning of words. For example, the typical person thinks that "some" means "a portion but not all" whereas the actual logical meaning used on the LSAT is "at least one, possibly all." This is why we stress figuring out their thinking so much--they don't necessarily think the way you expect them to, just like the law doesn't always work the way people think it does or should.

Thanks!