LR Question 10 Explanation
QUESTION TEXT: There are rumors that the Premier will reshuffle the…
QUESTION TYPE: Principle
CONCLUSION: It’s likely the cabinet won’t be reshuffled.
REASONING: There were meetings before every other reshuffle. There haven’t been any meetings presently.
ANALYSIS: These answer choices are all quite complex. Read them slowly and try to understand what they say.
If something does not “obtain” that means it didn’t happen. That’s in the correct answer, B, which is worded very densely.
___________
- This is way off track. The conclusion talks about likelihood, but the premises are certain (all past reshuffles were preceded by meetings.)
- CORRECT. We would expect a reshuffle to be preceded by meetings. There were no meetings, so that undermines the idea that there will be a reshuffle.
- This hypothesis is not supported by the available data: there have been no meetings.
- This would be a principle that argues in favor of the idea that there will be a reshuffle. It might happen, even if there were no meetings. The phenomenon (a reshuffle) might recur even under different circumstances.
- This is something different. An example would be if I claimed that the sky is either green or red. Those are inconsistent statements because the sky can’t be both green and red. You point out the sky is not green. That certainly doesn’t prove the sky is red.
Recap: The question begins with “There are rumors that the Premier will reshuffle the”. It is a Principle question. Learn more about LSAT Principle questions in our guide to LSAT Logical Reasoning question types.
More Resources for Principle Questions
- Intro Course lesson: This intro course lesson covers Principle questions.
- Mastery Seminar lesson: This LR Mastery seminar lesson covers principle questions.
Reading these answer choices has me confused… Can anyone dumb answer choice A and B. down for me simply?
Totally normal! LSAC writes answer choices very abstractly so it’s harder to decipher the meanings behind them.
A is saying that if a conclusion logically follows from some facts, then the probability that the conclusion is true can’t be less than the probability that the premises are true. You don’t actually need to know what this means to rule this out as a wrong answer, but let’s take an example for clarity’s sake:
Premises: There’s an 80% chance of rain today. If it’s raining, the ground will be wet.
Conclusion: The ground is wet.
The conclusion (ground is wet) cannot be less likely than the premise (it’s raining). If there’s an 80% chance it’s raining, there’s at least an 80% chance the ground is wet because the conclusion logically follows from the premise. The probability of the conclusion can never drop below the weakest link (the premise).
But you don’t even need to go that far to rule out A. A is talking about probabilities with the premises, while the stimulus says that EVERY previous reshuffle was preceded by meetings. So the premises in the stimulus are certain, there’s no “probability that the premises are all true” – they are all true.
B is saying that a hypothesis is weakened if something we’d expect to happen if the hypothesis were true doesn’t actually happen. In this case, the hypothesis is the belief that the Premier will reshuffle the cabinet. So B is saying “The belief that the Premier will reshuffle the cabinet is weakened because something we’d expect to happen if this were true [meetings with senior cabinet members] didn’t actually happen”. Which is exactly the point that the stimulus is making, and hence why B is right.
Hopefully that clarifies things! Let me know if you have any other questions.
This is not the correct question. It’s supposed to be PrepTest 102, but once you click on question 10 of section 2, it takes you to PrepTest 19.
The question # you are commenting this on is PT 102, Section 3, Question 10, so I think you might just have clicked on the wrong section. This is the correct link to Section 2, #10: https://lsathacks.com/explanations/lsat-preptest-25/logical-reasoning-1/q-10/ (which is correctly linked on the PT 102 Explanations page). But yes, when you click on the links you will see the old format PT numbers. The content is still exactly the same though! Hope that helps.