#19 - Style manual: Archaic spellings and styles of

[otanriverdi]

1st Premise says(1st sentence) : if they occur infrequently AND do not interferes, they are to be preserved..

2nd Premise says(2nd sentence) : However, if they occur frequently, the editor may modernize them, inserting a note...

Answer D says: An editor may modernize .... If that punctuation occurs frequently AND interferes with reader compreshension.

My question is: Answer D says "occurs frequently" AND "interferes", but not premises. Though I see frequently part, I do not see the interferes part in the 2nd premise above. Answer D puts one additional condition by putting "AND" where the 2nd premise does not have that "AND". Is "interferes" assumed from the 1st premise since 2nd premise starts with however? Can you please explain?

[Steve Stein]

Hi,

Thanks for your question. I think it helps to consider what is going on logically:

The stimulus provides that if archaic spellings are frequent, the editor can change them.

So, again, frequent occurrence is enough (sufficient) to allow changes:

frequent occurrence allow for changes

That means that frequent occurrence that also interferes is more than enough to allow for changes to be made:

frequent occurrence
and allow for changes
interfere

Lets consider another example: Let's say that you don't like chocolate. If I give you a bowl of chocolate ice cream, you will turn it down:
chocolate ice cream --> you turn it down

But what about if I offer you a bowl of chocolate ice cream with chocolate sauce? That's more than enough to guarantee that you turn it down--but you will still turn it down:

chocolate ice cream
and you turn it down
chocolate sauce

I hope that's helpful! Please let me know whether that's clear--thanks!

~Steve

[otanriverdi]

Hi Steve:

Thank you for your explanation. One section is not clear to me.

what about

frequent occurrence
and allow for changes???
not interfere

Given A -> B , (A and C) -> B would be true only if A and C are mutually exclusive. For example, let's say you don't like plain milk.
plain milk -> you turn it down
plain milk and chocolate (chocolate milk) -> it is not sufficient to know that you turn it down. You may take it.

[Steve Stein]

Thanks for your response.

Again, frequent occurrence is enough to allow changes:

That means that we might add several conditions and still not affect the basic outcome tat frequent occurrence allow changes.

In the example from the stimulus:

frequent occurrence
and allow for changes
interfere

And from your example, even if they don't interfere, frequent occurrence is still enough to allow for changes:

frequent occurrence
and allow for changes
NOT interfere

I hope that's helpful--please let me know whether this clears that one up--thanks!

~Steve

[Barcelona10]

My question is about question 19 in the December 2006 LR 2, MUST BE TRUE:

The passage seems to provide the conditional: If archaic spellings/styles occur infrequently and don’t interfere with reading comprehension, Then those spelling/styles are to be preserved. The answer is D, which gives the a different conditional: IF punctuation from an older work occurs frequently and interferes with reading comprehension, Then an editor may modernize the punctuation from the older work. But this answer seems to be a MISTAKEN NEGATION...so I didn’t choose it. Where am I going wrong? I chose E because at least it didn’t seem to contradict the passage.

Thanks

[Steve Stein]

That's a good question. In that one, the author points out in the second sentence that with frequent instances of archaic spellings and styles, the editor may modernize them.

So, an editor may modernize such archaic phrasings and spellings--even if they don't interfere with reading comprehension--if they happen frequently.

If such archaic (old, outdated) phrasing are frequent, and they interfere with understanding, that would still provide reason for modernization (if anything, that much more reason).

Again, the frequency in this case is sufficient to allow for modernization, with or without the additional comprehension interference.

I hope that's helpful! Please let me know whether this is clear--thanks!

~Steve

[Barcelona10]

Thank you very much for your explanation.

So, when I see "follows logically" I'm usually looking to combine two sentences or come up with a logical conclusion based on the stimulus. In this one, it seemed that you just used sentence 2 to deduce the answer. Am I correct in assuming this? In other words, whether punctuation creates reading comprehension is irrelevant to the conditional established by sentence 2. But how did you deduce its irrelevance? Just based on the fact that it wasn't mentioned in the conditional? If so, based on this logic, had the answer been "if the punctuation is frequent and the punctuation is fancy-looking (or insert something else that is irrelevant), then the editor may modernize", would it have been correct? Again, I appreciate your help

[Frank Cozzarelli]

The first two sentences of the stimulus are diagrammed as follows:

~frequent + ~interfere --> preserve
frequent --> ~preserve

Often the trick with conditional reasoning is figuring out what statements are useful in helping us to find the right answer - they don't always combine into a long chain of inferences.

Here, we only needed to use the second sentence to find the right answer. The fact that the punctuation occurs frequently is sufficient to find that the editors may modernize the punctuation. The additional statement about interfering with reading comprehension is irrelevant, since according to the logic of the second sentence, frequency is sufficient. The challenge here is that by mentioning interference, the test writers are making it seem like we should be using that first sentence to find the right answer, which isn't the case.

[avengingangel]

Interesting.

I really struggled with this one. I chose (C), but now see that's it's incorrect because the sufficient condition for modernization is the frequency, not the the interference. (Wow, there's a bunch of stuff the test writers threw in the stimulus to be distracting) Based on your explanations, the following is true for all situations, right:

If A C
Then A + B + D + Z + X C

I, of course, didn't chose (D) because I thought, since you cannot "separate" an A + B C conditional statement in the way you can to a A or B C statement, that adding something on to the sufficient condition in a "+" manner, would change the relationship / not necessarily follow logically to C. So if you can confirm the scenario above for me, that would be great, and I would also have a revelation.

Thanks for all the explanations.

[Clay Cooper]

Hi avengingangel,

Thanks for your question.

This is the question I see (correct me if I've misunderstood what you're asking): if I have A + B C, can I add a term to the sufficient side? (e.g., make it A + B + D C).

Can it be done without breaking the rules? Yes. Is it useful? Very rarely. In other words, you can do it, but you probably shouldn't very often at all. Imagine our rule were that if it's an animal and it's big, then it is a caribou. We have:

A + B C.

Could we correctly add another term to the left side, without breaking the rule? Yes. For instance, we could say

A + B + D C.

No matter what D is, that statement holds true; it must, because it totally contains the statement A + B C. However, it is unlikely ever to be useful to you, because it is always going to be more difficult to prove than the first statement. Thus, in practice (as you're doing an LSAT), you should probably avoid it. I don't think I do it very often (or ever) when working on the LSAT.

I hope that helps!