LSAT 138 | Section 4 | Logical Reasoning: Q7

LR Question 7 Explanation

QUESTION TEXT: Psychologist: Research has shown that a weakened immune…

QUESTION TYPE: Necessary Assumption

CONCLUSION: Cancer patient support groups may help survival rates by boosting the immune system.

REASONING: Cancer patient support groups can lower stress.

ANALYSIS: On necessary assumption questions, you often must notice where the author switched terms. The shift in terms tends to indicate a gap between concepts: this will be the missing assumption.

Here, the author tells us that cancer patient support groups reduce stress. But the author then claims that the support groups help the immune system. Those aren’t the same thing. So the author must be assuming that lowered stress helps the immune system.

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1. This is utterly irrelevant.
   Negation: At high enough levels of extreme stress, some cancer patients won’t be able to function.
2. This is crazy. It means “disease has nothing to do with biology or chemistry”. That’s insane and utterly contradicts the germ theory of disease, one of the most established scientific principles. The author couldn’t possibly require this answer to be true.
    
   All the author needs to assume is that “Some factors not considered strictly biochemical, like talking, may nonetheless affect the biochemistry of disease”.
3. CORRECT. If stress can’t weaken the immune system, then the argument has no evidence that support groups can help cancer patient survival rates.
   Negation: Stress has no impact on the immune system.
4. This is too extreme. Discussion doesn’t have to eliminate stress. It just has to reduce it, and the argument already said support groups do that.
5. This answer gets it backwards. It’s only necessary that “A weakened immune system is a symptom of stress”.