#24 - Global Reference, Must Be True, Organization

[Administrator]

Please post your questions below! Thank you!

[itstanaya]

I've been having trouble with these types of abstract questions. Any tips on how to approach these?

[Robert Carroll]

Tanaya,

As always, prephrase! If you took notes on the function of each paragraph when originally reading, go back to those notes to help with the prephrase. If not, briefly go back to each paragraph and try to describe in a short phrase what each is doing. I do want to note, it's not necessarily the case that the organization of the passage and the paragraph-by-paragraph structure map onto each other one-to-one, but that's usually a good place to start. And in this case, the answer DOES divide by paragraphs.

Another thing to keep in mind is that one wrong thing about an answer choice makes the whole thing wrong. Organization questions are Must Be True questions. So there's a difference between responding to an answer by thinking "I didn't think of saying it like that, but maybe that's an ok way to see it" and responding by thinking "I didn't think of saying one of these phrases, and that phrase does not correctly describe the part of the passage it's purporting to describe." The latter types of answers are Losers, and you can reject them.

In this case, I might prephrase something like "The 1st paragraph presents a theory, the 2nd talks about some kinds of evidence expected to be consistent with that theory, and the 3rd talks about other kinds of evidence expected to be consistent with it."

Looking at the answers in turn:

Answer choice (A) is definitely wrong in its description of the third paragraph.

Answer choice (B) is definitely wrong in its description of the second paragraph.

Answer choice (C) is definitely wrong in its description of the third paragraph.

Answer choice (D) is definitely wrong in its description of the first paragraph.

Answer choice (E) is left, and there is nothing wrong with it.

Robert Carroll

[SGD2021]

Hello,

For this question, can you please clarify how/why the second and third paragraph describe IMPLICATIONS? I have now seen the word "implications" come up twice in different RC passage questions but I keep getting the questions wrong bc I don't think I fully understand what is meant by implications. What does "implications" mean and what are examples of what "implications" can entail on RC on the LSAT?

Thank you!

[Adam Tyson]

An implication is something that is suggested but not explicitly stated. You can think of it sort of like effects, or inferences. "If X is true, then a bunch of other stuff would also follow" - the other stuff that follows are the implications, the things that are suggested to be true if X is true.

In this case, "empirical implications" are things that could be tested and measured if the claims in the first paragraph are correct. In other words, that's some stuff that we could find out if we looked for it.