LR Question 25 Explanation
QUESTION TEXT: Physician: Heart disease generally affects men at an…
QUESTION TYPE: Necessary Assumption
CONCLUSION: Testosterone promotes heart disease and estrogen inhibits it.
REASONING: Heart disease affects men more than women. Women usually only get heart disease after menopause. Young men have a lot more testosterone than women and women lose estrogen after menopause.
ANALYSIS: The physician hasn’t shown that testosterone or estrogen cause or prevent heart disease. He’s just shown that there is a correlation.
___________
- Tempting, but the physician wasn’t concluding that estrogen and testosterone were the primary causes.
- Likewise, the physician wasn’t concluding that they were the only causes.
- The physician didn’t compare the risk for the two groups. Maybe women have a really, really high risk once they undergo menopause.
- CORRECT. He’s assuming correlation is causation.
- The physician didn’t say that. He was talking about general trends within a population. Men have higher testosterone on average even if some men have low testosterone.
More Resources for Necessary Assumption Questions
- Negations Article: Learn about negations on the LSAT.
- Conditional Reasoning Article: Learn about conditional statements.
- Negations Drill: Practice your negation skills.
- LR Diagrams Guide: Learn how to draw LR diagrams.
- Intro to Conditional Reasoning: Learn conditional reasoning basics.
- Intro Course lesson: This intro course lesson covers Necessary Assumption questions.
- Mastery Seminar lesson: This LR Mastery seminar lesson covers necessary assumption questions.
This should be LR II (not LR I).
LR I means the first LR Section, and in this case that’s the second section of the test as a whole. You can refer to the test’s page to know where each section falls in the overall test: https://lsathacks.com/explanations/lsat-preptest-30/