- Tue Mar 29, 2011 11:26 am
#19
Hi bkloss,
You have run into an issue that can be very bothersome at times, namely the interchangeability of certain words, and LSAC's predilection for not following any set rule with those words (which is certainly intentional—they don’t want people to know exactly what they will do in any given situation).
First, as will come up in Chapter 11, the word “some” encompasses a lot of different possibilities because the logical definition of “some” is “at least one.” As such, “some” and “many” can be the same, and really are the same in the absence of knowledge about the overall size of the groups (“many” changes meaning depending on context: “many Americans” is a far larger number than “many of the 200 scientists in this room”). Plus, because “many” will always be at least one, the presence of “many” automatically implies “some.” For example, if I say that “Many Americans enjoy fishing,” that automatically means that “Some Americans like fishing.” So, when the test makers use “many” in the question on page 86, they can later on use “some” with no logical issue created by doing that.
Second, and this was intentional on their part, they know that the majority of test takers play a subconscious matching game with words in the stimulus and words in the answer choices. People like symmetry, and when they see “many” in the argument followed by a certain type of statement, and then see “many” in the answer choices followed by a somewhat similar type of statement, they will be more inclined to choose that answer. Hence, because the language in answer choice (D) mirrors that of the stimulus, it becomes a very attractive answer. The difficulty is that they slightly change part of the answer so it does not follow from the stimulus.
Last, the use of “some” instead of “many” in answer choice (B) is again intentional. As I talked about above, “many” automatically means “some,” so the test makers are in the clear here. But they use “some” because it throws off people looking for language that is largely the same. The actual rule to draw from this is that in LSAT questions, be careful when the answer uses exactly the same language as the wording in the stimulus. A lot of test takers blindly choose those answers without further analysis, and in many cases those answers are incorrect.
Please let me know if that helps explain what they are doing here. The people who make this test are very smart, and their goal is less about using what we might agree is appropriate, and more about using what is logically defensible, if that makes sense.
Thanks!
