LR Question 19 Explanation
QUESTION TEXT: If the jury did not return a verdict, there would…
QUESTION TYPE: Parallel Reasoning
CONCLUSION: The jury must have returned a verdict.
REASONING: Verdict ➞ Media Trucks, Media Trucks ➞ Verdict
‘There are no media trucks.’
ANALYSIS: This is a good argument. It gives a conditional statement as evidence, and one fact (‘there are no media trucks’).
This fact is used with the contrapositive of the conditional statement to draw a conclusion.
Some answers have good arguments, but they don’t use the contrapositive. You should always pick the answer that most mirrors the stimulus.
___________
- This is a bad argument. It incorrectly assumes that negating the sufficient condition negates the necessary conditions. There could be other reasons that tourism is low.
H ➞T
‘There will be no hurricane.’ - CORRECT. This argument combines a fact with the contrapositive of the conditional statement.
H➞ A,A➞ H
‘Peter did not rent an apartment’ - This is almost a good argument, but we don’t know whether Renate always keeps her promises. Also, this argument doesn’t use the contrapositive. It just uses the conditional statement as it is.
W➞ D (Renate promised this)
‘Linus’ car isn’t working’ - From the way this is phrased, it’s actually not clear that ‘last week’ includes ‘last night’. It might mean every day of the week leading up to last night.
In any case, this argument doesn’t use the contrapositive. It just uses the conditional statement as is. - This isn’t a good argument. Maybe Manuela is the only person who could solve the problem.
More Resources for Parallel Reasoning Questions
- Conditional Reasoning Article: Learn about conditional statements.
- LR Diagrams Guide: Learn how to draw LR diagrams.
- Intro Course lesson: This intro course lesson covers Parallel Reasoning questions.
- Mastery Seminar lesson: This LR Mastery seminar lesson covers parallel reasoning questions.
The title is wrong here. It says section II but it’s really section IV. When you navigate to it from the previous page and you select question 19 in section 4 it opens up this question but then says section 2.
Hey! It doesn’t actually say Section 2, it says “Logical Reasoning II”. This is a legacy of the old format that included Logic Games, where there were typically 2 LR sections so Graeme referred to them as LR1 and LR2. Once we update the site to completely consist of the new format, you may see a change in this. But Logical Reasoning II means the second LR section of the test (in this case, Section 4), not that it’s from Section 2. It used to be intuitive with the old format but may be confusing now, so hopefully that makes sense!