Q16 - Marife: That was a bad

[twopac1112]

I was between A & C, and ended up with A. Can you please explain to me how to derive answer C, and also how should I be approaching Disagree questions. I read some of the prep books that say that the answer should give a straight yes from one paragraph and no from another paragraph? is this a recommended technique?

[tommywallach]

Hey Twopac,

On disagreement questions, there are two types of wrong answers. Either the answer shows something where the two people actually AGREE, or it shows a place where we know one person's opinion on the subject, but not the other's. Be wary of this latter answer type, as it's the trickier of the two.

Marife: Movie bad. Bad because violates requirement of m.m.
Nguyen: Filmmaker wants focus on relationship. Murder not important.

(A) Marife says movie is bad, but Nguyen never says it's good.
(B) Nguyen says that relationship is important, but Marife never directly disagrees.
(C) Marife says it's a bad murder mystery. Nguyen says the murder "should not be taken as the defining characteristic of the film," meaning it shouldn't be classified as a murder mystery. That's disagreement.
(D) Neither of them discuss whether it's "appropriate" to find criteria like this, but both of them do it, so if anything, they'd agree that there ARE criteria (even if they don't necessarily agree on what those criteria are).
(E) Odds are they agree on this, though Nguyen doesn't directly address it anyway.

I wouldn't put it quite as simply as the books you refer to, but it is fair to say that the disagreement needs to be CONCRETE, and IN THE TEXT.

You: Let's go to the movies right now.
Me: But I'm hungry!

In this example, you and me don't necessarily disagree about whether we want to see a movie today. We don't disagree about whether we like movies. We only disagree on whether we want to see a movie before or after we eat. Make sense?

-t

[twopac1112]

Thank you for the breakdown but there is 2 things I still don't get in this question.

1) Marife says it violated a requirement, if it violated a requirement that means its not a Murder Mystery, I know this is not meant to be a conditional, but haven't we learned through the Lsat that if something fails to have a required property than it can't be true, so I took Marife to say no this is not a murder mystery because it violated the requirement, and Nguyen obviously is saying that the murder just provides a context so also "NO" its not a murder mystery. Am I going to deep into this??

2) If the answer choice said "Whether the movie is a murder Mystery" (without the "should be classified") I would say okay Marife is looking at it as it is thats why she speaks of the violation, and Nguyen is saying its not a murder mystery. But the placement of the word should just throws everything off.

[ivanau12]

I hope this response will help clarify! This is actually where the "should be classified" becomes important for the answer.

Marife thinks that the movie violated a requirement of murder mysteries; by saying so, he is automatically classifying the movie as a murder mystery. (Think about it this way: if you're not classifying the movie as a movie mystery, why would it matter that the movie is violating a requirement of this genre?) As you pointed out, Marife said "no, it is not a murder mystery" - by saying yes/no to the question whether it is a murder mystery", one is classifying it as such.

Nguyen says that the murder is only a part of the story and shouldn't be taken as a defining characteristic of the film, so basically just because there's a murder in the movie you shouldn't necessarily classify it a murder mystery.

i.e. They disagree on whether it should be classified as a murder mystery.

[kyuya]

Marife's argument:

- it violated the requirement of murder mysteries, therefore it was a bad movie


Nyguyen:

- the fact that it violated the requirement of a murder mystery should not be its defining characteristic - the film maker had other focuses in mind for the audience

To be honest, in real time I could not quite pin down their disagreement, so typically I will go into the answer choices looking to eliminate, having a solid idea of what both arguments are saying.

(A) We never learn if Nguyen thinks its a bad movie or not. If there is no opinion given here, how could this be the disagreement? For all we know Nyguyen agrees with Marife.

(B) We don't really know what either party thinks about this aspect of the movie. We know that Nguyen thinks the FILMMAKER thinks its important, however, we do not know what Ngyuen thinks about it.

Additionally, we do not know whether Marie thinks it was an important part of the movie -she very well could. Do not conflate her opinion of the movie quality with whether she thinks one certain aspect of the movie is important (and not even necessarily good).

(C) I'd probably leave this and come back. I know Marife think's it shouldn't be since it violated a requirement of a muder mystery, and therefore is not a murder mystery. Nguyen seems to think it is still a murder mystery, but I'm still a bit hazy on what Nguyen is actually disagreeing with.

(D) This answer choice is a bit tricky. I think the key word here is "appropriateness".

Although there seems to be a disagreement about whether or not there should be a certain criteria that a murder mystery must fit, there is not a discussion about the appropriateness of the pursuit of this standard.

Perhaps we could say they debate about if there is a required condition for murder mysteries, but could we say that Marife or Neguyen thinks the standard is appropriate? We have no idea. The fact that Marife uses that as a standard does NOT mean she thinks its appropriate. She could just be a stickler and likes sticking to standards that are set out, regardless of her own personal feelings toward it.

(E) Neither parties give their opinion about this. Marife speaks about not giving the audience enough information to solve it, but does NOT speak about whether or not the filmmakers intention was to have people be able to solve it. As a matter of fact, neither of them speak on the filmmakers intent, but rather the consequence of how the film was portrayed.

At this point, I'd go back to (C) and realize that the last sentence in Nyguen's response tells me that he doesn't think simply because the movie didn't provide viewer with all the information to solve the mystery, it is not a murder mystery. Marife's point is clear, and it is here we find the discrepancy.

[andrewgong01]

Hi
I am unsure about how "B" is the answer. I went with "E"

I did not go with "B" because to me it seemed unclear if Ngyuen thinks it is or is not a murder mystery; Nguyen just says there was a different focus. I also thought selecting "B" assumes that just because a film wanted you to focus on relationship means that the film can not be a mystery movie; i.e. it assumes mystery genre and focus on not solving murder mystery are mutually exclusive concepts but we have no direct evidence to suggest this mutually exclusive idea. I am not quite seeing why by stating that it was not the main focus means it is not a murder mystery genre because they could co-exist as it is never explicitly said they can not co-exist.

[ohthatpatrick]

(C) is the correct answer, not (B).

Nguyen said that "the murder should not be taken as a defining characteristic of the film".

Marife considers the film a "murder mystery".

Do you think that it's common sense to say that
... "for murder mysteries, the murder is a defining characteristic of the film"?

That seems like a pretty fair claim to me. I mean, the word 'murder' is INCLUDED in the name of the 'murder mystery' genre. Seems like a defining characteristic.

So if someone thinks that a murder is not a defining characteristic of a film, then that person would not consider that film a murder mystery.

[JeffW669]

I'm going to give a different interpretation of why A, B, D, and E are wrong, and why C is correct (and why this is nonetheless an objectively bad answer choice).

A) Marife believes this, but we don't know what Nguyen thinks on the topic.
B) Nguyen believes this, but we don't know what Marife thinks on the topic.
D) Marife is only talking about the criteria of murder mysteries, not all mysteries. Imagine there's a burglary mystery -- surely that mystery is not required to provide "viewers with all the information necessary for solving the murder."
E) It's too hard to say what Marife would say about this. Maybe she believes the filmmaker tried to provide the information but there was a failure in execution (e.g. maybe somewhere after the filming process a key scene was accidentally deleted). Or maybe she believes the filmmaker didn't want to provide the information, and that was a failure in decision-making.

C) This is still a really tricky -- and in my opinion, bad -- option. We can pretty safely say Nguyen believes it's not a murder mystery, because the murder isn't a defining feature. However, the big problem is that we can easily interpret Marife's comments to go either way. Interpretation 1) she's judging the movie in the context of murder mysteries -- and this would imply she believes it's a murder mystery. Interpretation 2) she claims the movie fails a requirement of murder mysteries -- not a requirement of *good* murder mysteries, but a requirement of *all* murder mysteries -- and this would imply she believes it's not a murder mystery. Obviously, the LSAT test writers wanted us to go with Interpretation 1, which is what makes C correct. Nonetheless, I think Interpretation 2 is equally valid and thus this is a bad answer choice. But it's less bad than A, B, D, and E -- so I guess if you were a truly 100% mastery test-taker, you could still feel okay going with C.