#11 - Special kinds of cotton that grow fibers of green or

[Juan315]

Dear Powerscore:

The correct answer includes a conditional statement: "Green and brown cottons that can be spun only by hand are not commercially viable." So I guess you could diagram this as H ~F. "H" for spun by hand and "F" for commercially feasible/viable. "~" negates F. I'm wondering if the stimulus also included a conditional statement or can we infer this conditional from the premise "Special kinds of cotton that grow fibers of green or brown have been around since the 1930s but only recently became commercially feasible when a long-fibered variety that can be spun by machine was finally bred." I know answers A. C. D. E. all contain either outside information or comparisons that we just can't infer from the information in the stimulus. My question is: did the stimulus contain a conditional statement regarding commercial feasibility and fibers made by machine? Or from the first premise, can we infer the conditional statement that fibers spun only by hand are not commercially feasible?

Any help will be appreciated! I'm trying to get better at recognizing conditionality in the stimulus and answer choices and when to turn this radar on/off so to speak.

[Frank Peter]

Hi Juan,

There's an old saying, "when you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail", and it can be very easy to fall into this cognitive bias on the LSAT with regard to conditional reasoning. Generally I warn against over-applying conditional reasoning since it can eat up a lot of time on the test if you start diagramming things that didn't need to be diagrammed to arrive at the right answer.

As you observed:

I know answers A. C. D. E. all contain either outside information or comparisons that we just can't infer from the information in the stimulus.

Since you were able to eliminate four answer choices just by a close reading of the stimulus, that's probably a good indication that you didn't need to worry about diagramming anything.