LSAT 139 | Section 4 | Logical Reasoning: Q7

LR Question 7 Explanation

QUESTION TEXT: Most respondents to a magazine survey who had recently…

QUESTION TYPE: Weaken

CONCLUSION: The survey shows that it’s more fun to listen to a novel than to read it.

REASONING: People who listened to a particular novel enjoyed it. People who read it didn’t enjoy it.

ANALYSIS: This survey doesn’t have a great sample. It only looks at people who read or listened to one book.

There are millions of books. Maybe there’s something special about this book that makes the audio book better. For example, perhaps the author gave a very passionate, personal reading.

It could be that in most cases, people prefer to read rather than listen. So to weaken the argument, we can show that this book is not representative of all books.

Maybe this audiobook was particularly good, or the written book was not so good.

___________

1. If you listen to a book, you must know whether you enjoyed listening to it. It doesn’t matter if you also read the book. And vice-versa.
2. We don’t know what this means. Do people enjoy reading books because they can rush through them? Or do they like listening to audiobooks because the enjoyable experience of listening to them lasts longer?
3. This is useless. It lumps everyone together. We need an answer that lets us distinguish between those who listen on tape and those who read.
4. Worthless. If there’s no audio version of a book, then there’s no point in making a comparison. You can’t prefer an audiobook version that doesn’t exist.
5. CORRECT. This shows that the novel was an exception. The book is hard to understand if you read it, but easier to understand if you listen to it.So the survey results can’t tell us about books in general. Most books aren’t hard to read.