Q17 - Science Teacher: In any nation, a flourishing

[Yangyi.vita]

Hi, can anyone please explain why C is correct? I have some issue with the phrase "essential to" as I'm from taiwan: does it equal to necessary?

[ohthatpatrick]

Yes, "essential" means necessary.

Here are some other phrases/words that do as well:
requires
in order to ___ you must ___
prerequisite
necessitates
depends on

==== complete explanation ====

Inference

We should read the information, keeping an eye out for Conditional, Causal, or Quantitative language (these are the three main sources of correct inference answers).

This paragraph is giving us lots of Conditional ideas (signified by 'essential', 'requires', 'necessary').

Typically, when an Inference question gives us Conditional ideas, we should symbolize them and see if they chain together (unless you're really good at mentally doing so).

These definitely chain together ... basically in the order they're given to us.

Successful economy ---requires--> flourishing scientific comm.

flourishing scientific com. --requires--> young excitement

young excitement --requires--> good communication

Putting that all together (and slightly abbreviating), we have

Succ Econ --> Flourish Scien --> Excitement --> Good Comm.

LSAT is very likely to test us on the first and last piece of this chain (to reward us for putting the whole thing together). They're also likely to test us on the contrapositive of the chain,

~Good Comm -> ~Excite -> ~Flourishing Scien -> ~Succ Econ

(A) Backwards logic.
Good comm --> Excitement

(B) This somewhat reflects the conditional chain correctly, but "the extent", "principally", and "the number" place this whole relationship on a continuum. The more kids that are excited, the more our national scientific community flourishes? It seems too numerically specific for the info we were given.

(C) This works. It is just saying
Succ Econ --> Good Communic.
That's our chain!

(D) "many" vs. "most" ... not the same

(E) we can't speak to whether Good Communic. is required for ANY scientific endeavor. That's too broad.

Hope this helps.

[DeborahH630]

Can anyone explain this in a bit more detail beyond using all the formal logic? I am still confused and looking to understand more why answer choice A is wrong and answer choice C is correct?