Setup and Rule Diagrams

[Dave Killoran]

Hi Jasmin,

Thanks for the question! First, let me reassure you that the answers are indeed correct Second, this is a tough and slightly weird game, so it's good to look at games like this prior to taking your LSAT.

You commented that, "It looks like each dancer is only allowed to be in each recital once, but the instructions didn't say this." What the test makers will tell you is that the way the game is described makes each dance is unique to each child. While it does not explicitly say a child can't repeat, their idea would be that once someone Karl dances in the first dance, that was his dance 1; he can't then dance another "dance 1" with a different partner. So, if Karl dances with two partners in "dance 1," they'd say that makes no sense and reject it. Thus, they didn't feel the need to make it explicit. It may even be they didn't want to make it clearer than that, because this was designed to be a very tough game overall.

So, I follow the point you are making, but obviously my job is to explain their thinking on things like these and they'd see it as 1-to-1 with the dances!

[jasminmccray]

Thank you. David! Pointing out the specification of dance 1 versus say dance 2 now makes sense to me because you wouldn't do the same dance twice.

[Mmjd12]

Hi!

While Pattern games usually slow me down, I actually found this game to be easier than average. I ended up drawing this setup which really helped me blitz through the questions.

I realized the order of the variables doesn't really matter in this case, so I placed three rows for KLM and then left blank spaces for their partners. In that sense, it almost worked like a tic tac toe board, for example if R and S were already in the 3rd Column for Miguel, then I could easily figure out where T belongs Similarly, if R and S were already plotted in Row 1 then it was clear where T must go.

Then all I had to do was mentally keep track of putting KS in either dance 1 or 2 and place R and S with the same partner in dances 2 and 3 respectively for each question.

[Robert Carroll]

Mmjd12,

You'll find the explanation on the first page of this thread gets a similar result by labeling the rows as the girls, where you choose to label columns as boys. You'll note the "tic tac toe board" nature of that diagram matches yours, although ours is a bit better since it drops the need to repeat. You can notice that in yours - "KLM" don't have to be repeated at all and should only be used as a general label for the columns in your diagram.

Robert Carroll