LSAT 152 | Section 1 | Logical Reasoning: Q3

LR Question 3 Explanation

QUESTION TEXT: Letter to the Editor: The arts section of this paper shows …

QUESTION TYPE: Weaken

CONCLUSION: The paper is biased in favor of movies and against local theatre.

REASONING: They’ve published way more movie reviews.

ANALYSIS: There’s two big issues here.

1. What if there’s been way more movies than local plays? The greater number of movie reviews might just be because there’s more movies to review.
2. What if all the movie reviews were horrible and all the play reviews were great? The number of reviews doesn’t necessarily mean those reviews are favorable.

The answer will likely address one of the two.

___________

1. It doesn’t matter what other papers do, because the letter is only saying this paper is biased.
2. CORRECT. This is the first weakness I mentioned. If there were way more movies released than plays, then the number of reviews might just correlate with availability. So maybe it’s not about bias at all.
3. Having five movie critics and one theater critic may actually support that there’s bias, since it suggests that resources are skewed toward movies.
4. Limited space only tells us the paper can’t review everything. It doesn’t explain or justify why movies receive much more coverage than plays.
5. This just tells us that coverage of live plays has increased in the last year, which doesn’t address whether current coverage is biased. Bias could remain even if things have improved.