Q23 - Editorial: Teenagers tend to wake up around

[mshinners]

Question Type:
Strengthen

Stimulus Breakdown:
Purported cause: Sleepiness from waking up too early
Effect: A decline in car accidents
Additional info: Granville pushed back their school start time and saw a decrease in accidents.

Answer Anticipation:
Good ol' Strengthen questions with Correlation/Causation flaws! We should look for an answer that:
1) Eliminates an alternative cause (Granville also hired more cops)
2) Shows the cause and effect going together (another town pushed the school start time back and saw a decline in accidents)
3) Shows that in places without the cause, there wasn't an effect (other towns didn't change their start time and didn't see a decline in accidents)

Correct answer:
(E)

Answer choice analysis:
(A) Out of scope. The argument gives us specific information about the melatonin pattern for teenagers. The comparison to children doesn't add (or subtract) any relevant information.

(B) Out of scope. Their tardiness isn't relevant (unless you make some large assumptions about being late and tired, and speeding).

(C) Out of scope. We don't know the start time of these jobs. Also, even if some teenagers have jobs, others are in school, so something that affects them would affect the overall level of accidents involving teenagers even if there's another group of teenagers that wouldn't be affected.

(D) Out of scope. The conclusion is specifically about teenagers driving to school, so statistics related to other time periods is out of scope. At best, this answer might call into question the data from Granville (which speak to the overall number of accidents instead of just pre-school accidents), but that would weaken instead of strengthen the argument.

(E) Bingo. Based on the argument, there's a chance that accident rates went down all over the place, which would call into question a conclusion based on the correlation in Granville. This answer tells us that accident rates actually got worse in other areas, thus making Granville's change seem even more likely to be the cause of their own decline in accidents.

Takeaway/Pattern:
Strengthen/Weaken questions with Correlation/Causation issues generally fall into set patterns you should learn.

#officialexplanation

[JaredH639]

Quick question regarding this one. I initially chose (E) and then reverted back to (B) after making the large assumptions that are stipulated. However, doesn't (E) also require us to make the assumption that no other school district changed their start time, or that the start times for schools in the surrounding region were not already later than 8 AM?

[Yu440]

Hi I mistakenly chose D. I thought it supported the answer because even though the overall number of car accidents involving teenage drivers in Granville declined after school began at 8:30am, we don't really know if the decline was in accidents that occurred in the morning or in the evening. Hence D supported the argument by clarifying that many of the accidents occurred in the evening (therefore the reduction was likely in morning accidents). Is this too much assumption on my part?

[DPCTE4325]

I've seen a lot of answers stating answer choice E is no cause - no effect... but how? Wouldn't that require the huge assumption that schools in the region outside Gainsville DIDN'T also delay their start time to 8:30?

Normally for STR questions I also try to increase the plausibility of the author's conclusion, but going into the A/C with the mindset of "how can I further try to prove that Delaying start time to 8:30 will decrease accident rates?" doesn't seem to get me to answer choice E.

[ohthatpatrick]

Hey-hey.

To the poster two back, (D) simply tells us that many accidents occurred in the evening.

You can't infer anything from that about accidents in the morning.

I can tell you truthfully that "Many U.S. Presidents have been men".
That doesn't allow you to infer that many other U.S. Presidents have been female.

So you shouldn't make any habit of trying to infer "shadow quantities" (to coin a term I instantly regret). If you're told that "Some A's are B", that's it. That's all you know. You don't know the "shadow quantity" (barf) that "Some A's are Not B"

-----------

To the previous poster, I tend to filter all causal assumptions/arguments through the same schema.

What was the CURIOUS FACT the author made a causal assumption about?
why is it that when Granville's high school pushed back its start time to 830am, the number of car accidents involving teenage drivers went down?

What is the AUTHOR'S CAUSAL STORY for that Curious Fact?
pushing the start time back to 830am presumably allowed teenagers to sleep more, presumably allowing them to sleep enough to get past the melatonin stage, allowing them to have less impaired driving ability, allowing them to get into fewer accidents.

Answers either deal with
- OTHER STORIES to explain the curious fact
- the plausibility of the AUTHOR'S STORY

On Strengthen, we'd pick an answer because it either
- RULES OUT some other story for the curious fact
or
- BOLSTERS the plausibility of the author's story

(E) makes it sound like Granville had something special going on, something unique to Granville. There wasn't some alternate factor bringing down teenage driving accidents in the broader area (better roads / lower speed limits / new driving restrictions / fewer teenaged driving trips).

There was something peculiar going on in Granville. Even as teenage driving accidents were going up elsewhere, Granville's accident rate was going down. Since the author thinks the causal difference maker was pushing the high school start time back to 830am, it would make sense in his world that driving accidents would only be affected in the driving area of the local high school. (E) seems to corroborate that idea.

So you can think of (E) as ruling out the possibility that accidents were declining more broadly in the region for some reason, and thus strengthening the plausibility that the causal difference maker behind the recent decrease in teenage driving accidents is some factor that is unique to Granville.

[EmilyL849]

Hi, Patrick

I understand the point of (E) is ruling out alternative causes. What if the decline was general? Other surrounding regions experienced same decline? With (E), that seems less plausible.

However, I still don't quite get how (E) does not require an additional assumption to work. (That other regions did not have their schools start 8.30 AM). The weakening logic behind (E) that the decline was not general, but was specific to Granville will only work if the compared parties are equal in relevant respects.
So, this would indeed seem to require a bridge that the relevant respect (in this case, the school starting time) was the same.
If other regions had the same starting time yet experienced a rise in car accidents, then with the same cause different results were achieved. (The same cause, different effects) This would seem to weaken rather than strengthen.
In contrast, if they had different starting times and other regions' experienced a rise, then this would strengthen the causal relationship. (No Cause, No effect)

I feel like generally, those added assumptions on our part make an answer choice wrong in strengthen and weaken questions.

For example, in the below question (PT61,S2,Q11), answer choice (B) does not work as a weakening answer choice, because it needs an additional assumption to bridge the gap.
https://www.manhattanprep.com/lsat/foru ... t2112.html
The assumption being 'even when drivers are entering the parking space, other cars waiting nearby makes drivers feel possessive of the space'.


So, I guess my question is,
1) does (E) not require an additional assumption to strengthen?
2) If yes, when is it okay to make those additional assumptions in strengthen / weaken questions?
3) the example question that I referenced (PT61,S2,Q11) and the question here, are they not the same?

Thank you!

[ohthatpatrick]

(E) definitely doesn't prove that the decline in Granville is from the new start time.

We can't expect Str / Weak answers to prove or refute. They will always leave wiggle room where the author could still be right or wrong. You're just a neutral referee (a judge or jury member) thinking "Does this fact score at least 1 point FOR the author or AGAINST the author?"

As you said, (E) makes it less likely that Granville's declining accident rate is something that was occurring more broadly in the region and thus unrelated to their high school's new start time.

We wouldn't care whether surrounding regions already had an 830am start time or not. We're not comparing the accident rate in Granville to that in any surrounding region.

We're comparing "how Granville's accident rate is changing" to "how the accident rate in other regions is changing".

If some of these other regions already had the 830 am start time, then they might have already had a lower accident rate to Granville (prior to when Granville changed its start time).

This is just saying "G's number is headed downward as the number in other nearby towns is heading upwards". That sounds like something specific to G is helping lower the accident rate, Is it the new high school start time? Who knows? But we've somewhat increased the plausibility that it's the new high school start time, since we're increasingly convinced that this declining rate is something specific to Granville.

Str and Weak are obnoxious for just this reason.

We're always picking the "best available" answer, and sometimes the "best available" answer BARELY does anything, but it does do more than nothing.

So there's not quite a rule of thumb, other than pick the best available answer. An answer that might be the best on one problem would certainly not beat other answers from other questions, but it might be the best of the available options for THAT question. It doesn't help us to make historical comparisons to other similar answers that were / weren't correct, because it's always comparative to what's in front of us.

That said, I don't love the comp to PT 61 (although I love that you're trying to connect questions).

On that one, (B) is just irrelevant since it's talking about ENTERING a parking space. They don't possess the parking space until they're parked there, so it doesn't seem like it has anything to do with the author's "possessiveness" explanation for why they LEAVE a parking space more slowly under certain conditions.

(A), meanwhile, is correct, even though it forces us to add the assumption that "when another car is waiting quietly, it's more pressure than when no one's waiting" and that "when another car is waiting/honking, it's more pressure than when a car is quietly waiting". But those assumptions seem rather safe by common sense standards.

Similarly, we're assuming that in the region surrounding Granville, they didn't simultaneously switch the starting time of their high schools from 8am to 830am. If the other region made the same switch at the same time, then (E) wouldn't strengthen the idea that this move cut down on teen accidents. But assuming that a neighboring town isn't simultaneously making the same change to its high school's starting time seems like a relatively safe common sense assumption.

The beginning of every LR section has a blurb you should read: it says we should avoid making assumptions that are by common sense standards implausible, superfluous, or incompatible.

But that implicitly gives us permission to make assumptions that are plausible, germane, and compatible.