LSAT 34, Logical Reasoning II, Q11, LSATHacks

LR Question 11 Explanation, by LSATHacks

QUESTION TEXT: The present goal of the field of medicine seems to be…

QUESTION TYPE: Necessary Assumption

CONCLUSION: More and more people will have degenerative brain disorders once we start living longer.

REASONING: We’ll be able to transplant all organs except for the brain. And there are many, many nerves in our body.

ANALYSIS: The argument is assuming that transplants are the only way to cure brain disorders. 

The math on this question may be confusing so I’ll give an example. Suppose you have 100 old people. Normally 50 die of a heart attack, 40 die of some kind of cancer and 10 die from a degenerative brain disorder.

But…now that we can save people with transplants, fewer people will die of heart attacks and cancer. Eventually all 100 of the old people would die of degenerative brain disease, since it is the only thing we can’t fix with a transplant. 

___________

1. Not true. The argument is only assuming that we’ll be able to save people from more and more diseases except for degenerative brain disorders. So they will become more frequent as people stop dying from other things.
2. It doesn’t matter how many transplants people need as long as we can successfully do them and keep people alive.
3. CORRECT. If we could cure all degenerative disorders without transplants then we could save people from that disease too. Degenerative disorder might cause an even smaller proportion of deaths. 
4. It doesn’t really matter what the percentage is now as long as it can increase in the future.
5. It doesn’t matter how much is being spend as long as:
    i. we’re able to do lots of transplants and ii. We can’t cure brain disorders. 

Hi, I'm Graeme Blake

Founder of LSAThacks; I scored a 177 on the LSAT.

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