Q2 - To discover what percentage of teenagers

[jcdjgd]

Can anyone explain why (C) is wrong and (D) is right?

I picked (C), because I reversed the FL statement as follows...

WP --> responses NOT Ambig
Contrapositive: if responses Ambiguous --> questions NOT Well Phrased

I thought that the contrapositive got it right.

Also, I didn't pick (D) because I felt it wasn't strong enough. The argument says "because statements are ambiguous, the responses are also ambiguous"

I'm guessing (D) is right because this question is looking for just a "general principle". It has to be consistent, but not overly strong?

Thanks in advance.

[LSAT-Chang]

Also, I didn't pick (D) because I felt it wasn't strong enough. The argument says "because statements are ambiguous, the responses are also ambiguous"

I'm guessing (D) is right because this question is looking for just a "general principle". It has to be consistent, but not overly strong?

Thanks in advance.

Your formal logic diagram seems to be right, but I think they key to why (D) is a better answer than (C) is because (C) has the word "always" -- it's too strong. The stimulus is just talking about this particular survey response not every single one of them out there. That's why (D) is a better answer since it has a much softer language, and that is what we want. I honestly didn't like (D) so much because of the word "poorly phrased" -- I personally thought that was too extreme -- but I guess we could interpret "ambiguous, amenable to a naturalistic, uncontroversial interpretation" to mean that it isn't "well phrased". Plus, (D) is better than (C) which seems to be the most tempting incorrect answer for this problem.

[ManhattanPrepLSAT1]

Hey nice discussion here!

Here's what I think is going on...

If you were to look at the argument core: the question was not well phased; therefore the responses are ambiguous.

The principle should bridge the evidence with the conclusion, and weakness is a preference to strength in this question since the question doesn't ask for a principle that would justify the conclusion, but rather a principle that conforms to the reasoning in the argument (hint: think Necessary Assumption). Answer choice (D) represents an assumption between the evidence and the conclusion, but in the form of an abstract general rule.

Using FL (aka: conditional logic) is perfect logical here, though don't be excessive with any notation.

(C) WP ---> ~A
(D) ~WP ---> A

So answer choice (C) represents a negation of the relationship between well-phrased questions and ambiguous answers.

While we're here, we should look at answer choices (A), (B), and (E).

(A) does nothing to relate ambiguous answers to the ambiguity of a question.
(B) does nothing to relate ambiguous answers to the ambiguity of a question.
(E) is irrelevant. How does naturalistic interpretations have anything to do with ambiguous answers?

Let me know if you need help seeing how to set up answer choices (C) and (D). The word "if" in answer choice (C) is what i used to organize it and for answer choice (D) the language "are likely to be" was useful.

[griffin.811]

I agree with Chang above, I had a hard time concluding ambiguous = poorly phrased. Glad I wasn't the only one.

[christinachenn]

I agree that there is a jump from a statement being "particularly ambiguous and amenable to blah blah blah" in the stimulus to a statement being "poorly phrased" as in answer choice D, but many Manhattan LSAT tutors advise that you should be more lenient about the test writer's language shift in the earlier questions (1-9 maybe).

Irrespective of the language shift, you can arrive at choice D by process of elimination.

First, the core of the stimulus is:
survey's statement is ambiguous -> survey's responses are ambiguous

(A)- "Uncontroversial statements" is not the same as a "statement amenable...to uncontroversial interpretation." Also, this answer choice includes nothing about the survey's responses.
(B)- This answer choice only mentions statements, and nothing about responses.
(C)- This answer choice has incorrect logic.
(E)- Again, only about statements and not about responses.

[krishna.kilambi]

The principle is ,
if questions are poorly phrased, answers might also be ambiguous (Choice D)
If questions are well phrased, answers might be ambiguous or non-ambiguous( We don't really care)

[erikwoodward10]

I have a question regarding the strategy of responding to this type of question. I see that above someone mentioned that we should approach these questions as if they were NA questions. However, I took more of a must be true approach--if the stimulus is true, which of the following must be true. This made it very easy to eliminate C, because the principle doesn't describe what is going on in the stimulus (we need to end at responses are ambiguous).

Is this approach flawed? Any thoughts?