6. (C)
Question Type: Unconditional (Orientation)
Orientation questions ask us to choose a complete and accurate arrangement of elements (the topics, in this case). These questions are your best friend. We call them orientation questions because they allow you to orient yourself with the game before tackling thornier questions. Work through the rules one by one and eliminate any answer choices that violate that rule.
If, at the end, you are left with more than one answer choice (or you eliminated them all), it means you don’t properly understand the game. Go back to the setup and the rules to figure out what you’ve missed. This is a friendly feature of the orientation question: it’s much better to discover you don’t understand a game at the beginning than the end.
To eliminate orientation answer choices, start with the easiest rule and eliminate answers that violate it.
In this case, we’ll start with Rule 2: S comes before O. This is violated by Answer choice (D).
Next, we’ll move to Rule 3: T before W. This is violated by (B).
We’re left with Rule 1, the KK anti-chunk. How do we use this rule to eliminate, when the answers list topics and not presenters? Remember from the setup: K presents P, S, and T. That means we can’t have any of those elements next to another one. Armed with this knowledge, we can eliminate answers.
Eliminate (A) because P and T are consecutive.
Eliminate (E) because T and S are consecutive.
We were able to eliminate two answer choices with a single rule. This is pretty rare. Not like seeing an elf ride a unicorn during a blue moon or anything, but it’s still unusual. For most orientation questions, each rule will eliminate a single answer choice. However, there are times when we can expect rules to eliminate more. Take a sec to see if you can determine when that might be. I’ll wait. A hint: how many answers will we have to eliminate? 4. So, if we have fewer than four rules... we could expect some to eliminate more than one answer.
That’s the case here. And, since no one at LSAC is our friend, the rule that eliminated two answers was the one we had to do a little extra thinking on before we could use it. Typical.
We’re left with (C). We’re happy because we now have a point in the bank, and we have a little better understanding of how the rules of the game work.