LSAT 139 | Section 1 | Logical Reasoning: Q1

LR Question 1 Explanation

QUESTION TEXT: Police chief: This department’s officers are, of course…

QUESTION TYPE: Strengthen

CONCLUSION: Officers can drink in moderation when they’re undercover in nightclubs.

REASONING: It’s useful for police to be able to work undercover in nightclubs.

ANALYSIS: Your first thought might have been: of course police have to drink in night clubs. Otherwise they’d seem strange.

Well, go with that thought. It’s the basis for the right answer. More and more, LSAT questions require you to use intuition and outside knowledge.

You can’t use outside knowledge to prove anything, but you can use it to form guesses.

We need an answer that shows that drinking in nightclubs offers a benefit. Only a benefit would allow the department to relax their rules.

___________

1. Experience isn’t an excuse for breaking the rules. This doesn’t tell us why we should let these experienced officers drink.
2. CORRECT. If this were true, then police officers couldn’t effectively go undercover in night clubs unless they drank.
3. Great, there are more nightclub operations. This doesn’t tell us why drinking is necessary during those operations.
4. It doesn’t matter what police officers think. They could be wrong. Also, to justify drinking in nightclubs, we need to show it has a benefit. This answer just says it doesn’t cause problems.
5. This is just a fact about public awareness. It doesn’t tell us whether police officers are right to drink in nightclubs.