LSAT 138 | Section 4 | Logical Reasoning: Q6

LR Question 6 Explanation

QUESTION TEXT: After an oil spill, rehabilitation centers were set up…

QUESTION TYPE: Flaw/Argument Evaluation

CONCLUSION: The sea otter rehabilitation effort wasn’t worthwhile.

REASONING: Only 18 percent of the counted otters affected by the oil spill survived. And 80% of the otters that died immediately were never found, so the survival rate is even lower.

ANALYSIS: I’m not quite sure how to classify this. It’s some variant of weaken/flawed reasoning/argument evaluation. The question type is rare; there’s no need to concern yourself with precisely how to classify it. Just solve the question asked.

The author says that we know how many sea otters were never found. How? If they were never found, how do we know how many there were? (The author might have an answer, but it’s nonetheless a question that must be answered).

Don’t worry too much about the numbers of live and dead otters. The only important claims are that 18% of counted sea otters survived, and the claim that many dead sea otters were never counted.

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1. If this was about the same species, and that species was endangered, then it might make the rehabilitation efforts more worthwhile. But this is about other species of sea otters.
2. CORRECT. Precisely. The author is claiming that, roughly: “the sea otter rehabilitation rate is even lower than it seems, because we didn’t find many of the dead sea otters”.
    
   But if we didn’t find those sea otters, how do we know they died?
3. I can’t see how this matters either way. This could mean 1-2 sea otters were trapped and released. That has zero impact on the argument.
4. The author is only talking about the success of the sea otter rehabilitation effort. Other species don’t matter.
5. The author doesn’t say if financial costs were too high, or what would be a reasonable price per sea otter saved. They seem to be judging the success of the operation based only on the proportion of sea otters that were saved.