Yup – you guessed it. These questions present you with an argument, and ask you for something that would either strengthen or weaken the argument.
Much like flaw questions and assumption questions, you should be looking for holes or “soft spots” in the argument as you read it, to try to predict what could be strengthened or weakened.
For some, the Reading Comp section can be a walk in the park, and for others, it can be a nightmare. The good news is that the skills needed to ace this section are totally learnable, and with the right practice you’ll get better over time. This brief guide will walk you through what your general strategy should be for each reading passage. If you practice and get good at working through reading passages in this way, you should eventually be able to perfect your score on this section.
Assumption questions can often be the most difficult questions on Logical Reasoning. You are presented with an argument and asked to find what the missing assumption in the argument is. Essentially, you must identify what the hole is in the argument, the thing that is not stated on the page but is evidently being assumed by the argument. (Yes, there is an important practical difference between necessary and sufficient assumption questions, but we’ll get to that later.)
In Part 1 of this guide, we learned what a sufficient condition is and what a necessary condition is, and that a necessary condition is nothing but a reversed sufficient condition. In Part 2, we learned that contrapositives are a way to express that relationship.
In Part 3, we’re going to look at how all this knowledge of conditional logic can help you to navigate through specific Logical Reasoning questions on the LSAT.
In Part 1 of this guide, we learned about sufficient and necessary conditions, and that every sufficient condition is just the reversal of a necessary condition, and vice versa – they are essentially just two ways of stating the same logical truth.
Now, we are going to build on what we’ve learned by tying in one of the biggest buzzwords on the LSAT – contrapositives.
Sufficient and necessary conditions are the crux of the LSAT – if you understand them well, it means that you have a good handle on logical reasoning and can excel on the LSAT.
The LSAT throws a lot of causal arguments at you, and asks you to either strengthen or weaken them. These questions can be tricky at times, but are fundamentally very simple and even predictable, so I thought I’d write a post about them that could hopefully save you a point or two on your next practice test.
On an inference question, you’re given a paragraph with a bunch of information, and asked which one of the answer choices can be inferred from the information in the paragraph.
These questions present you with an argument, and your job is to select another argument that follows the exact same logical structure.
These questions are fairly simple. They provide you with a dialogue between two people, and ask for something the two of them definitively disagree on.
