LSAT 135 | Section 2 | Logical Reasoning: Q15

LR Question 15 Explanation

QUESTION TEXT: Economist: A country’s rapid emergence from …

QUESTION TYPE: Sufficient Assumption

CONCLUSION: Countries that put collective goals before individuals’ goals cannot emerge quickly from an economic recession.

REASONING: A country needs substantial new investment to recover quickly from a recession. People must have confidence in the country’s economic policies before they will make new investments.

ANALYSIS: The economist gives us this chain:

• Quick recovery → New investment
• New investment → Confidence

So in the reasoning we have:

• Quick recovery → New investment → Confidence

The contrapositive is:

• NOT Confidence → NOT New investment → NOT Quick recovery

But the conclusion is about countries that put collective goals first.

The conclusion says:

• Collective-goals countries → NOT Quick recovery

Where did those countries come from? They’re nowhere in the reasoning.

So we need to connect “Collective-goals countries” to the rest of the chain. We need something that says: Collective-goals countries → NOT Confidence.

Once we add that, everything falls into place.

The full chain becomes:

Collective-goals country → NOT Confidence → NOT New investment → NOT Quick recovery

And then the conclusion is clean: Collective-goals country → NOT Quick Recovery.

___________

1. This reverses the first premise. The stimulus says: Quick recovery → New investment. This says: No Quick recovery → No New investment.
2. This is about whether recessions change public opinion. The argument needs to know whether those people have confidence, not whether confidence changes during recessions.
3. This talks about countries that prioritize individual goals. The conclusion is about countries that prioritize collective goals. Completely different group.
4. CORRECT. This is the missing assumption. It connects the new concept (“collective-goals countries”) to the existing chain.
5. The argument is about recovering from a recession, not causing one. This introduces a completely different issue.