LSAT 128 | Section 2 | Logical Reasoning: Q15

LR Question 15 Explanation

QUESTION TEXT: H. G. Wells’s great dramatic novel The Time Machine is …

QUESTION TYPE: Sufficient Assumption

CONCLUSION: The Time Machine should not be classified as science fiction.

REASONING: It has compelling characters, which great dramatic novels have, but science fiction generally lacks.

ANALYSIS: On sufficient assumption questions, you should look for a gap between the reasoning and conclusion. Usually, I recommend diagramming since a lot of them involve conditional reasoning. This argument does not, so instead you can think of it like this:

• The book has one trait common to science fiction (it’s set in the future)
• It also has a trait that aligns with great dramatic novels but is generally absent in science fiction (compelling characters)
• Therefore, it must not be science fiction

But why must that be the case? The argument assumes that a novel cannot belong to both genres at once. Without this assumption, the conclusion wouldn’t follow – The Time Machine could simply be both a great dramatic novel and a science fiction book.

___________

1. The argument says that great dramatic novels generally have compelling characters, not that all novels with compelling characters are great dramatic novels. This would be like saying “everything with a tail is a cat” just because all cats generally have tails.
2. It doesn’t rely on the assumption that all novels can always be neatly classified. It just raises a challenge to the classification of a specific novel.
3. The argument never made any claims about what makes a work of science fiction great or not.
4. The argument contrasts dramatic novels and science fiction based on character depth, but it never claimed that characters are the most important factor in a novel’s quality.
5. CORRECT. The argument assumes that a novel cannot be both a great dramatic novel and a science fiction. Otherwise, The Time Machine could belong to both genres, contradicting the conclusion that it should not be classified as science fiction.