LSAT 156 | Section 4 | Logical Reasoning: Q24

LR Question 24 Explanation

QUESTION TEXT: A movie studio’s script readers discard all proposed scripts …

QUESTION TYPE: Flawed Parallel Reasoning

CONCLUSION: A script submitted by an agent and formatted correctly will not be discarded.

REASONING: Scripts are discarded if they lack an agent or are incorrectly formatted.

ANALYSIS: The reasoning can be written as: If no agent OR incorrectly formatted -> discarded.

The conclusion then says: If agent AND formatted correctly -> not discarded.

That’s an incorrect contrapositive. Just because those are two ways to get rejected, doesn’t mean they’re the only ways. There could be other reasons a script gets discarded.

The correct way to take the contrapositive of the reasoning would be: If not discarded -> agent AND formatted correctly.

• Because agent and correct formatting are REQUIRED (necessary) to not get discarded. If you’re missing either one, you’re done.
• But just because you have both, doesn’t mean you won’t get discarded. Something else could be wrong.

In general, you can write this structure as:

If X or Y -> Z.
If not X and not Y -> not Z.

That’s what you should look for.

___________

1. This is valid. It correctly applies the rule: missing a required condition (deadline) leads to rejection.
2. This is flawed, but in a different way. It infers one condition must be false without ruling out others. Not the same structure.

3. CORRECT. This has the same structure. It gives two ways to improve fitness, then wrongly concludes that if neither happens, improvement won’t occur, ignoring other possibilities.

   • If exercise OR quit smoking -> improve fitness
   • If not exercise AND not quit -> not improve fitness
4. This is valid. Expired permit directly triggers ticketing under the rule.
5. This is flawed, but differently. It generalizes from “most” to “all”.