LSAT 101 – Section 3 – Question 18

LSAT 101 - Section 3 - Question 18

December 1997

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Question
QuickView		 Type Tags Answer
Choices		 Curve Question
Difficulty		 Psg/Game/S
Difficulty		 Explanation
PT101 S3 Q18
+LR
Necessary assumption +NA
Link Assumption +LinkA
A
69%
169
B
5%
161
C
3%
161
D
10%
162
E
13%
166
148
159
170
 +Harder 146.901 +SubsectionMedium

J.Y.’s explanation

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The widespread staff reductions in a certain region’s economy are said to be causing people who still have their jobs to cut back on new purchases as though they, too, had become economically distressed. Clearly, however, actual spending by such people is undiminished, because there has been no unusual increase in the amount of money held by those people in savings accounts.

Summary
The argument concludes that people in a certain region who have jobs are not reducing their consumer spending in response to widespread layoffs in the area. The argument supports this with the claim that these people with jobs are not saving more money than usual.

Notable Assumptions
The argument assumes that if the people in question were reducing their consumer purchases, then they would save more money. In other words, that there isn’t some third way that people might be spending their money, leading them to reduce consumption while also not saving more.

A
If people in the region who continue to be employed have debts, they are not now paying them off at an accelerated rate.
Debts would be a third way to spend money, meaning that people might not be saving more even though they’re reducing their purchases. So in order for the argument to function, it must assume that debt repayment hasn’t suddenly increased.
B
People in the region who continue to be employed and who have relatives who have lost their jobs commonly assist those relatives financially.
Assisting relatives financially could be a way to use money that involves neither consumption nor saving—but the argument’s assumption is that something like that isn’t happening. So to assume that this is happening isn’t necessary at all.
C
If people in the region who have lost jobs get new jobs, the new jobs generally pay less well than the ones they lost.
The argument is only concerned with people who “still have their jobs” and not people who are having financial difficulties due to losing their jobs, so this is an irrelevant consideration.
D
People in the region who continue to be employed are pessimistic about their prospects for increasing their incomes.
How people with jobs feel about their likelihood of making more money is irrelevant to the question of whether or not they’re currently cutting back on consumer purchases.
E
There exist no statistics about sales of goods in the region as a whole.
The argument is trying to infer information about sales of goods from statistics about saving habits. Whether actual statistics about sales of goods exist is irrelevant to that inference.

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LSAT PrepTest 101 Explanations

Section 1 - Reading Comprehension

Section 2 - Logical Reasoning

Section 3 - Logical Reasoning

Section 4 - Reading Comprehension

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