LR Question 2 Explanation
QUESTION TEXT: Jake: Companies have recently introduced antibacterial…
QUESTION TYPE: Agreement
ARGUMENTS: Jake says people should use antibacterial products. They kill common bacteria.
Karolinka says that people shouldn’t use these products. The products create anti-biotic resistant strains of bacteria.
ANALYSIS: Both of them agree that the products kill some bacteria.
I got this question wrong. I thought it asked what Jake and Karolinka disagree about. Oops. There are two ‘agreement’ questions on this test. Agreement questions used to be quite rare. Watch out for them on future tests.
___________
- CORRECT. Jake and Karolinka both say the products kill some bacteria.
- Neither of them mentions dirt.
- Only Karolinka mentions this.
- Neither of them mentions whether common bacteria are a health concern.
- Jake says people should use anti-bacterial products. Karolinka disagrees. The question asked what they agreed about.
More Resources for Point at Issue Questions
- Intro Course lesson: This intro course lesson covers Point at Issue questions.
- Mastery Seminar lesson: This LR Mastery seminar lesson covers point at issue questions.
So interesting. I got this one wrong too, untimed! Just completely goofed on reading. Feels good to know I’m not the only one.
Hey Graeme,
Do you have any advice on how to approach agreement questions generally? I also got this question wrong. It seems that this question requires the understanding that Jake and Karolinka are in dialogue with one another so as to make sense of Ks comment about how “some common bacteria survive the use of these products.” By it self, that comment doesn’t guarantee that K believes some bacteria are in fact killed (insofar as “some” means “more than zero” rather than “less than all”). But reading K’s comment in the context of J’s makes it reasonable to infer that K believes the products also kill some common bacteria.
Does this line of reasoning accord with your understanding of this question, and do you think this type of inference is at the core of this question type, or merely incidental of this question particularly?
Best,
-Phillip (this is tellamoredo from reddit, by the way).
You may be being too critical. You’ve talked yourself into a scenario that Karolinka wouldn’t agree with. First, let’s see if I’ve got your argument correctly:
“Karolinka didn’t explicitly state the products will kill some bacteria, so we can’t know she meant it.”
But Karolinka said “the bacteria that SURVIVE the use of these [antibacterial] products”
The word survive implies an actual danger. And we’re talking about bacteria. There are millions of them even in a small space. It’s ridiculous to imagine that using an *antibacterial* will fail to kill at least one bacterium.
Further, any well-informed observer would agree that bacteria develop resistance to antibacterials because the ones without resistance die, and those that survive and reproduce are more resistant. This is natural selection at work, and it’s the basis of much experimentation. This is enlightened common sense. Not only are you allowed to use it, you MUST use it. It’s a hidden rule of the LSAT.
In short, no sensible reading of Karolinka’s argument allows the possibility that no bacteria die. We don’t have to read the two statements as a dialogue. This information is contained right within Karolinka’s argument.
(I say you’re supposed to use common sense, but on this question it’s more proper to say that you should have refrained from contradicting common sense)