LSAT 131 | Section 3 | Logical Reasoning: Q13

LR Question 13 Explanation

QUESTION TEXT: A recent study of 10,000 people who were involved in

QUESTION TYPE: Weaken

CONCLUSION: You’re less likely to be injured if you drive a large car than if you drive a small car.

REASONING: A survey looked at 10,000 car accidents. Car drivers were only injured in a small percent of large car accidents, but a high percentage of drivers in small car accidents were hurt.

ANALYSIS: This argument leaves off the base rate. It makes a jump between two concepts:

The evidence was about the odds of injury if you were in an accident.

The conclusion is about the overall odds of injury from car accidents.

Those are two very different things. If large cars are in more accidents, then those cars might be more dangerous overall, even if the risk per accident is lower.

___________

1. This answer doesn’t distinguish between large and small cars, so it can’t say anything about the difference between them.
   This could have worked had it said “small cars are more often driven in high speed limit areas, which are dangerous.”
2. So? The accident rates were only about the risk of injury in the type of car you were driving at the time. It doesn’t matter if you sometimes drive other types of cars: The survey looked at 10,000 accidents, not at 10,000 people.
3. The argument is only about the risk of large vs. small cars. Medium cars aren’t relevant.

4. CORRECT. If this is true, large cars might be more dangerous overall. Imagine this scenario:

   • Large cars: 2% risk of injury in an accident, and you get in an accident 50% of the time you take a trip.
   • Small cars: 15% risk of injury in an accident, and you get in an accident 0.1% of the time you take a trip.

   Which car would you drive?

5. So? The point was about which group had more injuries. “More” is very different from “a lot”. You can have more risk from an activity even if that activity is fairly safe.