Logic Games 5th Ed, Page 38 Question

[EaronR591]

Hello. I am working through this guidebook and my attempt at diagramming #4 on this page, in particular the last condition, was very different from the answer provided on page 39. Specifically, I interpreted the statement, "Personnel must be placed on a floor higher than tech...." to mean that Personnel could be on ANY floor higher than Tech...not necessarily the floor adjacent (above) Tech.

Additionally, I interpreted the phase, "...or on one higher than shipping...." to mean that Personnel would be on the adjacent floor one above Shipping. While I interpreted, and diagrammed this phrase in the way shown in the book, upon discovering my issue with the first clause, I believe that on another day I might have interpreted the use of the word "one" to be a pronoun replacing the word "floor" and therefore mean that it is just on any floor above Shipping, i.e. not referring to the position above Shipping.

As opposed to the language used In the the third condition for this example, "...must be placed directly above or below...." - the language in condition four seems ambiguous.

Is this standard language that I should just learn to mean a certain thing? Is this perhaps an example written for teaching purposes that wouldn't be ambiguous on an official LSAT question? I'm hope for any guidance/recommendations/feedback on how to interpret this sort of language.

Thank you very much.

[ohthatpatrick]

I think you're interpreting the 4th rule mostly correctly, but maybe you're misinterpreting the way we drew it (because they purposelessly put a chunk box around a relative ordering rule)

If this were a horizontal board,
___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___
1(bottom)...................6 (top)

then you could write the 4th rule as
T/S - P - S/T

or if you prefer to see it both ways,
T - P - S or S - P - T

These are relative ordering relationships, NOT directly adjacent relationships. That would look like TPS or SPT.

"A floor higher" is "somewhere higher".
"one floor higher" is "the next floor above"

However, the 4th rule is using "one" as a pronoun to mean "a floor".
"P must be either on a floor higher than tech or on one higher than shipping, but not both"

Hope that helps