LSAT and Law School Admissions Forum

Get expert LSAT preparation and law school admissions advice from PowerScore Test Preparation.

 Administrator
PowerScore Staff
  • PowerScore Staff
  • Posts: 8927
  • Joined: Feb 02, 2011
|
#10723
Complete Question Explanation

Flaw in the Reasoning—SN. The correct answer choice is (A)

In this case the author’s first two premises are presented in the first two sentences of the stimulus, and the conclusion appears at the end. To begin, we are told that reducing one’s fat intake can help a person to avoid heart disease, and that if one avoids dairy foods, one is less likely to eat fat. These two conditional premises can be linked, as follows:
  • Avoid dairy foods :arrow: reduce likelihood of eating fat :arrow: reduce likelihood of heart disease
The author then draws the broad conclusion that avoidance of dairy foods increases the probability of maintaining good health:
  • Avoid dairy foods :arrow: increase chance of maintaining good health
This conclusion is problematic because it changes terms in the conclusion (from reduce likelihood of heart disease to maintaining good health) and thereby becomes very broad in scope. The author has mentioned one advantage that comes with the avoidance of dairy foods—such avoidance makes one less likely to eat fat. The author jumps to the conclusion, based on this one listed advantage, that avoidance of dairy foods will increase the chance of maintaining good health. This change in terms is the most obvious error, but as it turns out, there is no answer that fits this flaw.

In cases like this, most students go through the answers and end up selecting a response they feel is closest to the "overly broad" idea (which is often (D)). Answer choice (D) doesn't really describe an overly broad conclusion or a change in terms, although it is understandable as to why it appealed: nothing else looked good so choose the closest thing, right? But (D) describes a flaw that doesn't exist, since everything here is clearly relevant. When this happens, and you have a voice in the back of your head telling you an answer isn't great, you must look for some other error. Because what they chose to do here in the answers was focus on a different error in the stimulus than the one in the conclusion.

This other flaw is that there could be more to the story (milk has fat, for example, but might offer some health benefits as well). So, since we only have been told one thing about dairy (fat), and we don’t know all of the effects of dairy avoidance (positive or negative), it is not valid to conclude that by avoiding dairy one can improve one’s changes of staying healthy.


Answer choice (A): This is the correct answer choice, as it provides an appropriate description of one flaw in the reasoning: the author only considers one negative consequence of eating dairy (the likelihood of eating fat), but the author fails to consider the fact that avoiding dairy could also yield negative results. This can be an easy answer to miss since the conclusion tends to draw most of the focus, but the key is that if you see an obvious flaw but no answer fully addresses it, look for a different flaw entirely!

Answer choice (B): This is not the flaw in the author’s reasoning, because the author doesn’t need to consider every way that one might reduce one’s fat intake. If the author instead had fallaciously claimed that avoiding dairy was the method to do so, this choice might be a winner. As it stands, however, this answer cannot be correct.

Answer choice (C): This is certainly not the flaw found in this stimulus, because the author doesn’t make such a broad claim—the author doesn’t say that every factor carrying negative consequence risks should be eliminated. Rather, the author only concludes that one can increase the chances of staying healthy by avoiding one food group (dairy)—also a flaw, but of a different sort.

Answer choice (D): This choice claims that the author appeals to evidence of questionable relevance, but this is not the case—while the stimulus author’s argument is flawed, the notion of lowering one’s fat intake by avoiding dairy is certainly relevant to the discussion of the maintenance of good health.

Answer choice (E): The author does not presume that anything will necessarily occur, but deals instead with probabilities, so this answer choice can be eliminated.
 Lina
  • Posts: 22
  • Joined: Aug 05, 2013
|
#10753
Thank yo, the explanation definitely clears up my confusion. I tend to think I can keep track of the relationships as I read the problem, but I will commit to diagramming it out...that would have definitely helped me out here.
 Steve Stein
PowerScore Staff
  • PowerScore Staff
  • Posts: 1153
  • Joined: Apr 11, 2011
|
#10882
Hey Lina,

Thanks for your response; the more examples you diagram, the faster you will get, and, as reflected in the question you asked about, diagrams get more valuable as the examples get more sophisticated.

I hope that's helpful--let us know how you are progressing!

~Steve
 Echx73
  • Posts: 36
  • Joined: Nov 11, 2015
|
#26026
Hello,

When I answered this problem, I incorrectly choose B. From your explanations above, you have mentioned reasons why A is correct and why E is not. Could you tell me why B is incorrect?

Lastly, could one say that both B and E are incorrect because they focus on the premise when we should have been focused on the gap between the premise and the conclusion?

Thank you!
Eric
 Ladan Soleimani
PowerScore Staff
  • PowerScore Staff
  • Posts: 43
  • Joined: Oct 08, 2015
|
#26122
Hi Eric,

If the author had claimed that avoiding fat is the only way of decreasing the risk of heart disease then answer choice (B) would have worked because the author would be ignoring other ways of decreasing the risk, but the author is only stating that avoiding fat is one of the ways to increase heart health. The issue with this choice and answer choice (E) is not that they focus on a premise, but tat they don't point out the main flaw that Steve described above. I hope that helps!

Ladan
 rneuman123@gmail.com
  • Posts: 38
  • Joined: Aug 17, 2016
|
#27971
Hi. I'm a little confused on this problem because I noticed that in the stimulus, the 1st premise refers to 'avoiding heart disease' whereas the conclusion refers to overall 'good health'. Because of this, I chose d. I see how a can be correct, especially without my analysis of the stimulus. Did I read too much into the stimulus?
 Emily Haney-Caron
PowerScore Staff
  • PowerScore Staff
  • Posts: 577
  • Joined: Jan 12, 2012
|
#28052
Hi rneuman,

I think you did read a bit too much into the stimulus here; while avoiding heart disease is not the only thing you have to do to maintain good health, it is definitely a part of it, right? So the conclusion would still hold despite the difference in terms/degree, since doing something necessary to maintaining good health increases the probability of maintaining good health. Does that make sense?
 rneuman123@gmail.com
  • Posts: 38
  • Joined: Aug 17, 2016
|
#28119
Yes. It does. Do you think that the test makers designed it to be deceiving in that way? I would only think so because d matched my original pre-phrase very well. I wonder if this is a common way to throw off test takers.
 Nikki Siclunov
PowerScore Staff
  • PowerScore Staff
  • Posts: 1362
  • Joined: Aug 02, 2011
|
#28212
Indeed, the incorrect answer choices are often purposely designed to be deceiving or attractive to test-takers who failed to prephrase or understand what they are looking for. The best way to inoculate yourself from the danger of being mislead is to (1) know what you're looking for ahead of time, and eliminate any answer choice that deviates significantly from that prephrase; and (2) use the question-specific test of confirmation to differentiate between any remaining contenders.

Thanks!
 kfactor901@gmail.com
  • Posts: 11
  • Joined: Aug 27, 2016
|
#28455
Can someone explain answer A a bit more? I also thought the flaw was changing from heart disease to good health as well.

Get the most out of your LSAT Prep Plus subscription.

Analyze and track your performance with our Testing and Analytics Package.