Q23 - Businessperson: Because the parking area directly in

[ohthatpatrick]

What does the Question Stem tell us?
Evaluate

Break down the Stimulus:
Conclusion: If maintenance had been on a different day, I would have gotten to meeting on time.
Evidence: Maintenance caused the parking area in front of building to be closed. After finding out I couldn't park there, it took me 15 minutes to find parking, making me a few minutes late.

Any prephrase?
The numbers at the end matter a bit. Since the author was only a few minutes late, despite searching for 15 minutes for parking, she is telling us that she arrived to the parking area with at least 10 minutes to spare. DEBATE IT: How could we argue that even if maintenance had been done on a different day, she STILL wouldn't have gotten to the meeting on time? We could say that the parking area in front of the building might have been closed for a different reason (she's assuming that if maintenance was on a different day, the parking area in front would be open). We could say that she might STILL have needed 15 minutes to find a space. Maybe the front parking area gets really crowded and searching for 15 minutes is the usual. (She's assuming that she would have needed LESS than 15 minutes to find a spot if maintenance had been on a different day). Maybe if she had parked in the front lot, she would have gotten tangled up talking to coworkers or had to walk by someone selling Girl Scout cookies, etc. (She's assuming that there wouldn't have been OTHER factors that could have made her late).

Correct answer:
C

Answer choice analysis:
A) We don't care WHY maintenance was being done. That won't help us assess whether she could have made the meeting in this alternate universe.

B) We don't care about other attendees. If the other ones WEREN'T late, that doesn't tell us that our author was lying about how long it took HER to find parking. The other attendees might get to work earlier or might have just arrived with more of a cushion of time for parking intangibles. Or maybe the other attendees were bigwigs with reserved parking spots. We want to know THIS author, with THIS cushion of time, with HER usual parking options ... would that have allowed her to get to the meeting on time?

C) This answer is terribly worded, but an answer to it could include information that would get at the key assumption of "on a normal day, I would NOT have needed 15 minutes to find a parking space". In order for us to think that her 10 minute cushion was enough to make the meeting on time, we need to know if you can usually park your car and get inside with that sort of cushion of time.

D) This seems tempting, because if she DOES have a tendency to be late, we might argue "Ah, you would have been late anyway. You're usually late." But that's not really engaging with her REASONING at all. She might have cared more about this meeting and than the TENDS to care about other meetings. So even if she's typically late, she might have tried harder than usual to be on time here and the parking situation may have genuinely thwarted her.

E) This doesn't address any of the intangibles of the alternate universe in which we don't have maintenance closing off the front parking area. Whether the answer is yes or no, we're in no better position to judge whether on a normal day it would take her less than 15 minutes to find a parking space.

Takeaway/Pattern: The correct answer is pretty unsatisfying because of how vaguely it's worded. But it's the only one that deals with the hypothetical alternate universe of our author's conclusion. We're trying to imagine a way to argue that "Even if there HADN'T been a maintenance closing off of the front parking area, you STILL wouldn't have made it on time." Although (D) gives us a weak potential objection of "You still wouldn't have been on time, because you're usually late for meetings", it doesn't engage the REASONING. The author's reasoning contains the assumption that if she HAD been allowed to park in the front parking area, it WOULD NOT HAVE taken her 15 minutes to find an available spot.

#officialexplanation

[ganbayou]

Hi,

I chose B for this question.
I thought B is correct because to see whether the Businessperson is lying or not, comparing with others who were in the situation would be helpful.
Is this wrong because it's asking to evaluate the reasoning rather than the truth of his argument?

Thank you

[JorieB701]

Hi,

I chose B for this question.
I thought B is correct because to see whether the Businessperson is lying or not, comparing with others who were in the situation would be helpful.
Is this wrong because it's asking to evaluate the reasoning rather than the truth of his argument?

Thank you

I'm not an LSAT geek but since it hasn't been answered I thought I'd give it a shot.
-I think choosing B is tempting if you're forgetting what your task is. Her conclusion is:

If the maintenance had been done on a different day --> I would have gotten to the meeting on time.

B is wrong because we just don't care about other people. I think we'd care if her whole argument was, "There's no way anybody could have made it on time to that meeting because the maintenance made it impossible to find parking on time."

Generally, it's important to pay attention to the scope of the conclusion. I did the same thing because I waffled between C and D, and D has the same problem B does. The conclusion isn't about other days. If I was like, "But Mary, you're ALWAYS late!" She could respond with, "Thanks Captain Obvious-- but I'm talking about this day. Not every other day."

[HelenH783]

I chose A for this one because I thought "maintenance" implied that the area directly in front of the building was in bad shape-- maybe it had flooded, or was riddle with potholes, or some other disrepair that required maintenance meaning she would not have been able park there even if the maintenance were happening on a different day. I still don't really see how this is wrong-- i think the use of "maintenance" instead of merely "the parking area directly in front of the building was [blocked off] today" has meaning. Why is this wrong?

I also don't see how C is right. On days the area in front of the building is open, couldn't we assume she would have no need to seek parking elsewhere?

Help much appreciated!

[ohthatpatrick]

You're saying the reason would matter to us, if the reason for maintenance was drastic enough (flooded lot / riddled with potholes) that it prevented drivers from parking there anyway.

If the functionality of a parking area is impaired by floods / potholes / etc., then it's a broken parking lot, and it would be closed for REPAIR, not maintenance.

Maintenance implies stuff like repaving ... cleaning ... repainting the lines. The lot was still usable, but they're just doing something routine to maintain its functionality.

As for (C), you're right that the author is insinuating that she normally parks in that front lot. But it might be a really crowded lot, with a bottleneck at the entrance, takes forever to find a spot, long walk back to the building ... they used the obnoxiously broad but vague "parking patterns" to encompass the idea of how long would it normally take you to find an available parking space?

[abrenza123]

I have a few issues with this question...

I'm having trouble seeing how D might not work as well. I was trying to argue how even without maintenance, she would have STILL been late for the meeting, but I thought that D provided an alternative explanation that could potentially have poked a hole in the argument. Wouldn't tendency be enough to help evaluate the argument? Even if the maintenance was done on a different day, if she's late 50% or more of the time that weakens/helps inform whether or not she'd be late even if it was closed.

I If she's saying she's late because the front was closed therefore 15 minutes for parking therefore few minutes late, wouldn't

Also, for the numbers, I wouldn't have thought to make use of them in the argument - In this situation it honestly didn't cross my mind because of the first sentence in the stimulus - "because the parking area was closed for maintenance, I was late to my meeting." I thought the third sentence was providing additional evidence, but because the author used "late to my meeting", I thought the "few minutes late" was nonspecific/offhanded/almost superfluous and was focusing on "I was late to my meeting (because x,y,z) on a day where maintenance blocked the front entrance parking" therefore "on a day without maintenance, I would have not been late," and was trying to find an alternative reason for why they might have been late w/o the maintenance, hence D and missing the assumption that 10 minutes is usually enough of a buffer. Would C still stand w/o if the stimulus said "15 minutes to find available space....making me late"??

I guess wasn't thinking about the numbers because I considered them all part of the premises/evidence because of the more general version of the premises in the first sentence and I wasn't questioning the premises. Would you be able to provide a more detailed breakdown of the argument structure, i.e. if there are intermediate conclusions?

How do you know when to make use of the numbers??

I thought parking patterns was a MORE ambiguous answer because it could literally only mean design of the parking or where there are more spaces, not necessarily how many or how often those spaces are usually filled. Are they using the term parking patterns like one would use traffic patterns? I'm concerned because I feel like a vague term/answer would in another context be considered too ambiguous or weak

[ohthatpatrick]

Nothing we say will make this question not suck. Let's just clarify that early and often. It's a pretty crazy correct answer. You, and me and everyone else, should be concerned about their ability to get THIS question right in the future.

"Parking patterns" means nothing to anyone. That's not a saying. But, yes, I interpreted it to mean that LSAT was talking about the broader sense of "how easy / hard is it to find parking" on days when the parking area in front is open.

It sounds like you interpreted it as "how would the parking spaces look, as a pattern, if we were looking at them from overhead?"

How do we know to care about the numbers?

Care about them if they are relevant to judging the conclusion / arguing against the conclusion. Care about them if they are relevant to judging the impact of an answer choice.

I think (D) is wrong in part because of the available numbers. Even if this person has a tendency to be late, we already know that she was NOT late to the parking lot.

The numbers tell us that when she found out she couldn't park in the front area, it was still ~15mins before the start of the meeting. Since taking 15 mins to find a spot (and then walking into the building and into the meeting) made her only a few mins late, we know that she didn't arrive to the parking area already late.

She definitely had a chance to be there on time, given that she was in the parking area ~15 mins before the meeting was to start. So what difference does it make if she tends to be late? We know for a fact she wasn't late on this day (to the parking lot). We're trying to figure out whether the maintenance screwed up her ability to be on time or whether she would have been late no matter what at that point.

Her notion is simply, "If this had been a normal day (front parking = open), and I showed up when I did on this day, I wouldn't have been late".

So to argue with this claim, we can't talk about when she TENDS to show up. We have to take on the parameters of, "had you shown up at the time you did on this day, but it were a normal day (front parking = open), you would still have been late."

It's too easy for her to dismiss the objection we're trying to make with (D):
"Yes, I know I tend to be late. But on this day, I was at the lot 15 mins early!"
(this is a reasonable response)

Meanwhile, the objection we can make with (C) , that it usually takes 15 mins to find a spot even when the front lot is open, has the potential to prove her wrong:
"Yes, I know it usually takes 15 mins to find a spot when the front parking area is open, but if the front parking area had been open, I wouldn't have been late!" (this sounds crazy)

Hope this helps.