LSAT 106 | Section 1 | Logical Reasoning: Q17

LR Question 17 Explanation

QUESTION TEXT: When a community opens a large shopping mall, it often…

QUESTION TYPE: Paradox

PARADOX: New shopping malls have a large amount of shopping activity. Yet towns with shopping malls don’t see a very large increase in shopping activity.

ANALYSIS: If there’s no mall in your town, you’ll probably shop downtown. If a mall opens, you might stop shopping downtown and shop in the mall instead.

So shopping activity might just switch from downtown to the mall.

Most people only have a certain amount of shopping to do. New stores won’t make them shop more.

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1. So? Malls still do attract shoppers. The question is: why doesn’t the total amount of shopping in town increase by about as much as the new shopping being done in the mall.
2. This makes the situation more puzzling. The mall is adding completely new shopping to the community; it isn’t stealing shopping from other areas.
3. This tells us about jobs. We care about shopping activity.
    
   To the extent that this affects anything, it makes things even more confusing. There are more employed workers with salaries in town, thanks to the mall. So why aren’t there more shoppers?
4. CORRECT. This does it. The mall just transfers shopping activity. It doesn’t cause people in the community to do much more shopping.
5. Same as C. We hardly care about jobs. We care about where people shop. If the mall creates few jobs, then it probably didn’t affect the unemployment rate much.