#14 - The book To Save the Earth is so persuasive that no

[Paul Marsh]

Hi haganskl!

So as you're suggesting, let's replace the portion of E about a "program" with "cause", so that it reads something like: "Every recipient of To Save the Earth will embrace the environmentalist cause." And you're asking whether that revised version of E would be a good answer to a Sufficient Assumption (aka Justify the Conclusion) question stem.

The original post in this thread states about the stimulus's argument, "The connection presumed by the author is that not only did everyone who received the book read it, but no one who was given the book was already committed to the environmentalist cause (as that would mean they could not convert)." That astutely points out that there are two issues with the stimulus's argument: 1) it assumes everyone read the book, and 2) it assumes that the recipients of the book weren't already down for the environmentalist cause.

Recall that a Sufficient Assumption is one that COMPLETELY gets us to our conclusion, totally eliminating the Gaps in our argument. Does our revised version of E eliminate both the issues with our stimulus's argument?

No, it does not. Our revised E does indeed eliminate the first problem with our argument - now it doesn't matter whether or not they actually read the book, since apparently receiving the book alone is now enough to get someone on board with the cause. However, it does not eliminate the second problem with our argument, namely: what if some of the recipients were already a part of the cause? (In that case, we wouldn't be able to conclude that 2,000 people were converted because at least some of those 2,000 were already part of the cause!)

So your revised version of E certainly strengthens the argument (by eliminating one problem with it) but it is not a sufficient assumption as it still leaves a large Gap unaccounted for.

Hope that helps! Good question by the way, thinking through how to turn wrong answers into potential right answers can be a very helpful thought exercise.

[haganskl]

Thank you!

[alexis.la]

I just wanted to comment and say that the LSAT is mean lol. I correctly answered D, but spent wayyy to much time looking at E. And the more I looked at it, the less likely I was to notice the obscure change from environmental "cause" to "program" because words tend to lose all meaning when we look at them too long. On the real test, if I spend too much time between 2 choices like this then my brain feels foggier after, and I'm frustrated. any tips to keep a good rhythm going?

I think my problem is sometimes I start trying to convince myself of why another answer could be right, and I need to stop that. I knew D did what the question stem asked too, so I shouldn't have given E the time of the day. I guess I need to remember that as soon as I start arguing for why an answer could be right, I'm straying from the information actually presented and that leads to error.

[Robert Carroll]

alexis,

I notice sometimes that students of mine do worse when they take longer on an LR question. Not universally, but often, and sometimes that's especially true for the less difficult questions. I speculate that one reason why that happens is that, when evaluating answer choices for a while, you start to judge answers by what seems right in the immediate context, which is a long process of evaluating answers, instead of always remembering the real context, which is "How does this answer answer this question given this stimulus?" It's easy to forget what the actual question is and what the actual stimulus was saying when you're spending so much time deciding between answers. So, if you find such a thing happening, bring it back to the relevant context - what makes an answer good for this question? I think that should help in many situations.

Robert Carroll