Logical Reasoning 3: Question Stem and Answer Choices
Check out Part One: Conclusion and Premise and Part Two: Reading the Stimulus first.
So, we’ve read the stimulus itself and made sure we understood it inside and out. Remember the example stimulus we’ve been working with:
The city council will vote Wednesday about whether to fund a new road-building project. The measure can only succeed if at least six members of the city council vote in favor, but all the city council members who have served more than three years will vote against the measure. So we know the measure will not pass.
We’ve already decided this argument is missing the explanation of how they know they won’t get six votes since the veteran council members won’t vote for it. I’m expecting that this question is going to say something like, “The argument is flawed in that it…” and then I’ll be able to express that it’s missing that important detail.
So let’s say I go on to read the question and I see this:
“Which of the following is an assumption required by the author’s argument?”
At first, you might think, Oh crap. We did all that thinking for nothing - this isn’t even asking about the flaw in the argument! But guess what? The fact that I know the flaw also means I know the assumption they’re depending on.
The author is depending on the assumption that there are fewer than six members of the council who have served fewer than three years and will vote for the measure. I already know that before I even look at the answers, so I’m not really going to pay any attention to answer choices that don’t address that.
Let’s say these are the answer choices I’m given:
A. The road building project will not be funded by outside means and therefore succeed.
B. No city council member who has served more than three years will vote for the measure.
C. Of council members who have served fewer than three years, there are no more than six who will vote in favor of the measure.
D. The proposed roads in the project are necessary for the city and do not affect other municipalities.
E. The city council members who have served fewer than three years will not vote against the measure.
So here’s where my LSAT philosophy differs from many LSAT teachers. I don’t give a rip if you know all the different question types - that is all made-up LSAT dogma, and you’ll waste weeks studying “official” question types that some dude made up to sell books. If you were to see a question like this in one of those books, they’d call this a “necessary assumption” question and tell you that you need to approach it a specific way because of its type.
Nope. You just need to read the question. It’s in English. Just answer what they’re asking. Don’t waste time in the abstraction of translating a question into some made-up “type” so that you can supposedly answer the question better.
Now, a disclaimer here: once you’re further along in your LSAT studying journey, I actually might advise you to look at what question types you tend to miss most often - some folks certainly might benefit from specifically drilling a certain question type that gives them trouble (lookin’ at you, parallel reasoning). I’d just never suggest you spend time on that in the early days of your LSAT life, when you need to be more concerned about the actual work of understanding arguments.
So instead of drilling question types, what should you do when you get to the question stem and answers? Read them carefully. Of course, that’s a little over simplified, so let’s look at it together. They’re asking me what assumption the arguer is depending on, in other words, what little factoid or condition they need in order for their argument to actually make sense.
And guess what? We already found that earlier. So let’s look through these answer choices and see what we can see.
A. The road building project will not be funded by outside means and therefore succeed.
Nope, they’re not relying on this. It could happen, I guess, but it wouldn’t change their argument about the fact that the measure itself will not pass. If the roads still get built anyway, that’s great, I guess, but I don’t really care.
B. No city council member who has served more than three years will vote for the measure.
At first, this sounds a lot like our prediction, so you’ll probably initially want to pay a lot of attention to it. However, this is a classic LSAT fake-out. We’ve already been told in a premise that this is true, so it can’t be an assumption they’re making behind the scenes. For example, if you show me that you have a five dollar bill in your wallet, I’m not making an assumption that you have five bucks. That’s already granted.
C. Of council members who have served fewer than three years, there are no more than six who will vote in favor of the measure.
Boom - this is exactly what we predicted. You might be thinking (and you probably should be thinking), Okay, cool, very impressive. You made your own argument so it magically had the answer you’d predicted as an answer choice. Real neat. But here’s the thing: we’re gonna look through a bunch of actual LSAT questions, and you’ll find that we are able to completely predict the answer to the question maybe half the time. You wanna talk about saving time in the Logical Reasoning sections? This is your guaranteed method: know what the answer is before you’ve even read the answers.
D. The proposed roads in the project are necessary for the city and do not affect other municipalities.
Yeah, no. Every now and then, the LSAT gives you an answer like this that’s just irrelevant. I just don’t care about this sort of information in context of the argument I’m actually looking at. It’s pretty tempting at first, because, as a person who lives in the real world, these kinds of considerations would usually be really important and interesting. However, in the made-up universe of this question, I don’t care if other towns even exist or if these roads serve literally no purpose.
E. The city council members who have served fewer than three years will not vote against the measure.
Another good fake-out: it’s very similar in some ways to the correct answer, but it doesn’t address the real issue: the author is assuming that we won’t be able to scrounge up enough votes because of the three-year veterans voting “nay.” The statement in E - that the newbies would vote for the measure - would actually weaken their conclusion. It’s a little hard to even understand that that’s what the author is saying because the answer choice is written with a double negative (“will not vote against”), which means you have to do some thinking to even understand what they’re saying.
Okay, pat yourself on the back! You’ve answered a logical reasoning question! Stay tuned for more examples using real LSAT questions.