Q24 - Good students learn more than

[LSAT-Chang]

I got (E) for this one, but I don't know how I did...
Now that I look at it for the second time, it doesn't make sense..

This was my diagram:

Good students --> derive pleasure from satisfaction of curiosity --> capable of concentrating on a topic so intently as to lose track of own identity

Could someone kindly go over why (A) through (D) could be true but (E) for certain, cannot be true?? Is it because (E) tells us:

capable of concentrating on a topic so intently as to lose track of own identity (MOST) --> NOT good students

but I can't infer anything from this. Don't really understand what this tells me. Please help!

[timmydoeslsat]

This one will be easy once you realize that the correct answer is B!

I went through this problem, chose B, and went and looked at your post, saw where you said E was the answer. I proceeded to have my head spin around like the exorcist girl after that.

I then decided to look at the answer key and it indeed said the answer was B.

We will talk about how choice B cannot be true after we go over the stimulus.

This stimulus is not an argument. It is a set of facts. This is very common with inference questions, such as this one. This is a could be true EXCEPT, which I label MUST BE FALSE.

If you have an answer that says that pink dinosaurs fly over your house at midnight, you cannot deem that to be "must be false" based on the statements provided in the stimulus.

This answer choice will be almost a gimme because you will be able to see how it goes AGAINST what the stimulus says!

What are these statements?

In this case it gives us a nice logic chain.

I would take that first statement to say:

Good students ---> Learn more than parents and teachers compel them to learn ---> Derive pleasure from satis. of their curiosity ---> Capable of concen. so intently that one loses track of self-identity

The potential problem I saw on your diagram is that you did not take into account that a sufficient condition can be seen in that first statement with the idea of what good students necessarily do, which is that they learn more than their parents and teachers compel them to.

Also, I realize that you like to receive advice on not only a specific problem, but on habits in general. I was once a fan of doing things like:

GS ---> LM PT compel --->DP from SofC etc......

I then realized that the quick way of diagramming was indeed saving me time initially rather than writing out the words or main phrases, but I was spending way too much time remembering what the abbreviations meant!! The way I typed this diagram on this problem is how I would do it on the test. You will save time on the interpretation of the chain. A lot of times, you will notice that the test will include logic entities or variables that start with the same variable, and this is not done by accident! It is to slow down those who use the abbreviations.

You will not be affected by those tricks with this technique.

Back to this particular problem.

We have our chain:

Good students ---> Learn more than parents and teachers compel them to learn ---> Derive pleasure from satis. of their curiosity ---> Capable of concen. so intently that one loses track of self-identity

We need something that we can prove to be false.

Answer choices:

A) This is talking about our entity at the end of our chain, this has no consequence to us. This is a necessary condition in our chain and we can CONCLUDE NOTHING from a necessary condition. So this can be true. Since this can be true, eliminate. We want something that must be false.

B) Absolutely false! This answer choice goes further than it has to in being wrong! Even just a some good students do not derive pleasure...would have been a MUST BE FALSE.

What do we know about a good student? By necessity, they must derive pleasure as we can see as we head down the logic chain. The good student(s) part is the very start of this chain, and once we have a case of this, which we do in this answer choice, we can move down the chain until it ends. This answer choices tell us that most good students DO NOT derive pleasure, and we know that in fact they DO! This is our answer.

C) This could be true. We know nothing of not good students. In fact, for all we know, the same chain could be conducted for not good students. Eliminate since we cannot prove this to be false.

D) Same issue. Anything about not good students could be true! Absolutely anything. You could not say one statement about not good students that must be false. Go ahead and try it. I will wait here until I get my AARP card. (Yes, I am assuming that it will still be there when I get that age!) (Yes I live and breathe LSAT)

E) Same issue! Not good students. Not provably false.

[LSAT-Chang]

The potential problem I saw on your diagram is that you did not take into account that a sufficient condition can be seen in that first statement with the idea of what good students necessarily do, which is that they learn more than their parents and teachers compel them to.

Also, I realize that you like to receive advice on not only a specific problem, but on habits in general. I was once a fan of doing things like:

GS ---> LM PT compel --->DP from SofC etc......

I then realized that the quick way of diagramming was indeed saving me time initially rather than writing out the words or main phrases, but I was spending way too much time remembering what the abbreviations meant!! The way I typed this diagram on this problem is how I would do it on the test. You will save time on the interpretation of the chain. A lot of times, you will notice that the test will include logic entities or variables that start with the same variable, and this is not done by accident! It is to slow down those who use the abbreviations.

You will not be affected by those tricks with this technique.

Hahaha I'm so sorry about freaking you out with the wrong answer for a second. It indeed is honestly a very quick and easy problem now that I follow your logic chain and explanation!!

You are correct in that I did miss the first sentence (conditional statement as well). I guess I'm still not used to diagramming sentences that don't have actual conditional statements that I recognize immediately!

With answer choice (E) which I chose, I did go backwards in the chain which I am not supposed to! And you are also right in that we could ultimately eliminate (C) and (D) right off the bat since both infer something about not good students which we know NOTHING about. Also with (A) and (E), we don't know anything about those people who are capable of becoming so absorbed in a topic that they lose track of self-identity and thus cannot say anything about it!

In regards to your great suggestion for diagramming, you described EXACTLY what I do (STILL)!! I'm so afraid, since I always have "timing" issues with not only LR but also with RC, so with LR, if I see problems like these, I immediately do the stuff you used to do: GS --> LMPTC --> DPSC --> CCTLSI

and you are so right in that I look at it, and I don't know what the heck those letters mean AT ALL (could only recall GS = good students) and so I do spend so much more time trying to figure out the stuff which I diagrammed MYSELF (which I really do think is very silly)! Since you are confidently telling me that I will be fine writing out all the variables, I will try to do that from now on and see how it goes. I guess I just can't "trust" myself in timing -- and am afraid that I will be spending over 3 minutes on such a problem like this one. But thank you so much for the great advice! I love these general advices as I'm such a formulaic person -- with zero flexibility which kills me on a lot of the LR problems.

[mitrakhanom1]

Previous posters mentioned: Good students ---> Learn more than parents and teachers compel them to learn.

But I was under the impression that conditional statements are not comparisons. I read the first sentence as a comparison and therefore ignored it since I did not read it as a conditional statement. How should I have broken down the first sentence to see the conditional?

[maryadkins]

A conditional statement can be made out of anything that can be restated as "If..., then...." In this case, you can restate the first statement as, "If a student is good, then he or she learns more than what teachers and parents compel him/her to learn."

It doesn't matter what substance is in the "Necessary" part of the statement (or the "Sufficient" part of that statement for that matter), that is, whether it's a comparison or not.

So if I tell you, "Wasp stings are more painful than bee stings," how might you rephrase this comparison as a conditional statement?

If it's a wasp sting --> more painful than a bee sting

OR

If it's a bee sting --> less painful than a wasp sting

This isn't to say that it's always the best idea to translate comparisons into conditional statements. In fact, most of the time I imagine that's not going to be necessary or even optimal. But it is possible to do so.