LSAT 152 | Section 4 | Logical Reasoning: Q9

LR Question 9 Explanation

QUESTION TEXT: Office manager: Every vacation an office worker takes …

QUESTION TYPE: Flawed Reasoning

CONCLUSION: To reduce exhaustion, workers should take many short vacations instead of a few long ones.

REASONING: Each vacation significantly reduces exhaustion.

ANALYSIS: If you went to a beach in the Caribbean for 2 days, would that make you equally as rested as being on the beach for 10 days? Probably not.

The argument is treating all reductions as equal. It assumes that because each vacation reduces exhaustion, more vacations = more total reduction.

But that only works if each vacation has the same impact, which they probably don’t. I’d certainly be a lot more rested if I went on 3 two-week long vacations a year than 20 two-day ones.

___________

1. This compares short vacations to each other, but the flaw here is in short vs. long vacations.
2. We don’t care about alternative methods, only vacations.
3. Sure, there’s differences between people in how much vacations reduce exhaustion in general. But that doesn’t concern the difference between short vs. long.
4. This compares total time vs number of vacations — related, but not the core flaw.
5. CORRECT. This is the issue: a long vacation might reduce exhaustion much more than a short one, so the strategy to reduce exhaustion is flawed.