LSAT 141 – Section 2 – Question 12

LSAT 141 - Section 2 - Question 12

September 2014

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Question
QuickView		 Type Tags Answer
Choices		 Curve Question
Difficulty		 Psg/Game/S
Difficulty		 Explanation
PT141 S2 Q12
+LR
Sufficient assumption +SA
Conditional Reasoning +CondR
Link Assumption +LinkA
Value Judgment +ValJudg
A
46%
165
B
0%
157
C
11%
160
D
34%
161
E
9%
159
149
165
180
 +Hardest 146.882 +SubsectionMedium

J.Y.’s explanation

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The chairperson should not have released the Election Commission’s report to the public, for the chairperson did not consult any other members of the commission about releasing the report before having it released.

Summary
The chairperson shouldn’t have released the report because she didn’t consult the other members about releasing it.

Missing Connection
The argument bases a prescriptive conclusion (”the chairperson shouldn’t have done this one thing”) on a purely descriptive premise (”the chairperson didn’t do this other thing”). The premise could lead to the conclusion if we supplied the value-judgment assumption that if the chairperson failed to consult the other members, she was wrong to release the report.

A
It would have been permissible for the chairperson to release the commission’s report to the public only if most other members of the commission had first given their consent.
Contrapositive: if she didn’t have consent from most other members, it wasn’t permissible to release the report. Since she didn’t consult the others to begin with, she can’t possibly have gotten consent from most (or any!) of them. Thus she shouldn’t have released the report.
B
All of the members of the commission had signed the report prior to its release.
Irrelevant. This is a purely descriptive assumption. Since the argument’s premise is likewise descriptive, there’s no way this assumption can lead to the argument’s prescriptive conclusion. The right answer must involve a value judgment that tells us when something’s wrong to do.
C
The chairperson would not have been justified in releasing the commission’s report if any members of the commission had serious reservations about the report’s content.
The sufficient condition here isn’t triggered by the argument’s premise; we don’t know whether any members actually did have serious reservations. All we know is that they weren’t consulted.
D
The chairperson would have been justified in releasing the report only if each of the commission’s members would have agreed to its being released had they been consulted.
Contrapositive: if not all members would have agreed when consulted, the chairperson wasn’t justified. The sufficient condition here isn’t triggered by the argument’s premise; we don’t know what the other members would have done. All we know is that they weren’t consulted.
E
Some members of the commission would have preferred that the report not be released to the public.
Irrelevant. This is a purely descriptive assumption. Since the argument’s premise is likewise descriptive, there’s no way this assumption can lead to the argument’s prescriptive conclusion. The right answer must involve a value judgment that tells us when something’s wrong to do.

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LSAT PrepTest 141 Explanations

Section 1 - Reading Comprehension

Section 2 - Logical Reasoning

Section 3 - Reading Comprehension

Section 4 - Logical Reasoning

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