#5 - A commission has been formed to report on the nation’s

[Administrator]

Please post below with any questions!

[LustingFor!L]

Premise: commission's report will be effective --> commission speaks with a unified voice.
Conclusion: individual members of the commission have repeatedly expressed their own opinions about disaster preparedness in the news media well in advance of competition of the report --> commission's report will not be effective.

This is a justify question, so premise + answer choice = conclusion. I need to link the necessary condition of the premise with the sufficient of the conclusion. So something like unified Voices --> expressing own opinions.

Narrowed down to C and E. I picked correct answer C, but spent to much time considering E.

C should be diagrammed as commission speaks with unified voice --> individuals member' opinion about disaster preparedness are not made public before the report is completed. My exact prephrase, except during the test I may have not prephrased

E should be diagrammed as commission members already had opinions about the nation's disaster preparedness even before the commission was formed --> Commission's report will not be effective. So this is restating the conclusion?

Please confirm my reasoning for this problem. Thank you!

[nicholaspavic]

Hi Lusting,

Yes, you are doing a good job prephrasing. I think you see it, but have not stated that there is a time transference going on here that needs to happen to justify the author's conclusion. This is an interesting question from the LSAC and I think you are picking up on it, so well done!

Keep up the good work!

[lunsandy]

Hi Powerscore,

During the exam, I fell for the trap and chose E. Nicholaspavic, can you expand on what you mean by "time transference"?

Can we get rid of E as well because of "some" which is too weak to fully justify our argument. Whereas, C's "only if" makes it necessary that the individual members' opinions cannot be made public before the report is completed.

Thanks a lot!

[Francis O'Rourke]

Hi Lunsandy,

I believe that Nick is referring to the shifts in time that the stimulus makes. For example, the conclusion concerns future results, while we are only given information about what has occurred in the past.

Furthermore, answer choice (E) makes very specific claims about when the commission members must have held opinions. It specifies that the report will not be effective if the members held opinions before the commission was formed. We have no information that allows us to specify when the commission members spoke out negatively against the nation's disaster preparedness, so we do not know how answer choice (E) affects the argument.

[BostonLawGuy]

The answer choice is a bit confusing. It bridges a gap between two premises (not between the conclusion and premises.)

Is this typical with Justify the Conclusion answers?

[Brook Miscoski]

Boston,

The stimulus uses conditional reasoning.

We are provided with the conditional rule:

Effective Unified
Not Unified Not Effective

Based on that rule, the stimulus offers the conclusion:

Public Opinions:arrow: Not Effective.

That is why the correct response, (C), provides the needed relationship to complete the conditional reasoning:

Unified Public Opinions

I would look at this as arising from the need to complete the missing step in the conditional reasoning rather than as something funny that a Justify question stem might allow.