Q19 - Employee: The company I work for has installed

[mshinners]

Question Type:
Match the Reasoning

Stimulus Breakdown:
A company has installed Facebook blockers to prevent distractions. However, windows are also distracting and no one thinks people should work in windowless rooms.

Answer Anticipation:
Shh, don't give them any ideas!

There's no real structure or conditional logic to this answer, so we should abstract it. I'd head into the answers with something like, "A given idea is bad because no one would argue an analogous situation is good."

Correct answer:
(B)

Answer choice analysis:
(A) Premise/conclusion mismatch. This answer compares people to each other to show that everyone's different; the stimulus sets up two analogous situations.

(B) Bingo. A given idea (banning the device) is bad because no one would argue an analogous situation (banning all chemicals) is good.

(C) This argument predicts a future course of action based on current needs and trends. There's no analogous situation.

(D) This answer is about things being sufficient and necessary, not analogous.

(E) This answer is about pointing out a counterintuitive conclusion (reduction ad absurdum - look it up!), not about setting up analogous situations.

Takeaway/Pattern:
There are some repeated abstract reasoning patterns the LSAT uses (both in Matching and in Procedure questions), so whenever you come across a Matching question where you need to come up with an abstraction, see if you can note other arguments that are similar. Here, there's an argument by analogy.

#officialexplanation

[seychelles1718]

Why does the question stem states there is an "argument" when there is no conclusion and support in the stimulus? Is it because the support-conclusion relationship is implicitly presented with an analogy?

[ohthatpatrick]

Yeah, the conclusion is implicitly represented by the "But".

The conclusion is implicitly, "that's a crappy reason for installing website filtering software".

It's pretty rare for there to be an implied conclusion to an argument, but it happens.

Some ID the Conclusion questions have even been written that way, and the question stem has said:
"Which of the following best represents the conclusion that the argument is structured to establish?"