Q7 - Antibiotics are standard ingredients

[ohthatpatrick]

Question Type:
Inference (most strongly supported)

Stimulus Breakdown:
Causality: The fact that antibio's keep animals healthy and increase meat yields ---leads to--> putting them in animal feed.
Conditional: If meat yields are reduced, some farmers will go out of business.
Belief: we should phase out antibio's in animal feed since they might make antibio's less effective on humans.

Answer Anticipation:
Inference is all about combining multiple facts, usually using Conditional, Causal, or Quantitative language.

The middle idea here is a flimsy belief, so it would be hard to use it to derive any other facts. The first and third idea connect because they both talk about "meat yields". How do they interact?

We know that antibio's are good for meat yield, and we know that when meat yields go down, some farmers go out of business. So it looks like using antibio's keeps some farmers in business. Getting rid of antibio's might force some farmers out of business.

Correct Answer:
E

Answer Choice Analysis:
(A) Not quite. This involves a missing idea that "if we realize antibio's in feed make them less effective in humans, we will stop using the antibio's in feed". Even though that's fairly reasonable, there's nothing we could point at to support that.

(B) This puts too much trust into the scientists' flimsy belief. They believe it MAY make antibio's less effective, but we can't go off that speculative belief and draw a firm conclusion.

(C) Extreme: "NO farmer will go out of business"? There might be tons of ways that meat yields could be affected. Sure, taking away antibio's might be one way. But maybe there will be a terrible storm / famine / drought some year that reduces meat yields and thus some farmers would still go out of business due to reduced meat yields.

(D) Extreme: "MOST farmers"? We have no information that allows us to generalize about 51% or more of farmers.

(E) Yes. If we get rid of antibio's, we'll lose the boost they provide to meat yields. Meat yields will go down, unless farmers use some other means of increasing them. And if farmers DON'T come up with some way to offset the drop in meat yields that comes from phasing out antibio's, then according to the rule in the final sentence, some farmers will go out of business.

Takeaway/Pattern: When you see the complex conditional "If A, then B, unless C", you can always represent that as "If A and ~C, then B". Here, that would be "If we phase out antibio's and DON'T find some other means to increase meat yields, some farmers will go out of business".

#officialexplanation

[Nina]

is B incorrect because the wording "ineffective" too strong? since the stimulus only says "less effective".

thanks!

[tommywallach]

That's absolutely right, Nina! This is an inference question. In this question type, the LSAT always plays with little word shifts like that. Good catch!

-t

[ttunden]

is B incorrect because the wording "ineffective" too strong? since the stimulus only says "less effective".

thanks!

Moreover, answer choice B also says "WILL" whereas the stimulus said may. Will is a lot stronger than may, so it is too strong.

C- too strong/extreme as well. Could be a lot of other ways to reduce meat yields besides following the scientist recommendation. No makes it to extreme.

D- Most makes this too strong as well. Stimulus just says some, and it only says because of reduced meat yields, not animal health. We don't know much about animal health nor what reducing/eliminating antibiotics would do to the health of animals.

A- this just talks about them being correct. We care about following their recommendation and what it may do, not whether their prediction is correct or not. Following their recommendation leads to some farmers going out of business not how accurate their statement is.

E is our correct answer here. This follows from our stimulus.

[asafezrati]

The stimulus mentions that scientists recommend something because they believe in something.
I thought that the speaker isn't really committed to what the scientists are saying/believing.

Can we eliminate B on the grounds that the stimulus doesn't say that the scientists are correct?

From the way answer choices A and C are stated it seems legit.

[ohthatpatrick]

Yeah, I think you're probably right. I'm a little nervous to give you permission to distrust the "facts" in an Inference question, but you're correct that the idea about antibiotics having less effectiveness IS merely presented as a belief.

I would just warn you that "most strongly supported" Inference answers don't have to be perfect, so there COULD be a situation in which they would want you to 'trust' the beliefs of scientists in order to draw a fuzzy moral to the story.

It would be smart to suspect (B) is wrong on a first pass for the reason you stated.

[alexcyt1995]

I have a question about E

The question stem states if yields are reduced, then some farmers will go out of business, but phasing out the antibiotic use doesn't necessarily reduce the yields, does it? Maybe without the antibiotics, the yields will return to normal. That's not the same thing as "reduced". Or should I understand "reduced" as reduced from the current yields?

[ohthatpatrick]

Yeah, you should understand "reduced" as relative to the current reference point (BEFORE phasing out).

Since antibiotics increase yields from our original starting point, phasing them out will reduce meat yields (presumably back to our original starting point).

It's kinda like steroids in baseball. Once everyone is taking steroids, the new default level of performance is higher. When we phase them out of the game, stats are reduced from what we were used to.