LSAT 70, Logical Reasoning II, Q5, LSATHacks

LR Question 5 Explanation, by LSATHacks

QUESTION TEXT: Sharita: Anyone who owns a cat should have it spayed…

QUESTION TYPE: Agreement

ARGUMENTS: Sharita says that there are a lot of stray cats, because people don't neuter their cats. She thinks that people should neuter their cats.

Chad says that stray cats cause disease, and that people shouldn't feed them.

ANALYSIS: Both Sharita and Chad agree that stray cats are a problem. Both of them would like fewer stray cats. Sharita would achieve this goal by having people neuter their pets. Chad would reduce the number of stray cats by having people not feed them.

All four wrong answers mentions thing that Sharita doesn't talk about. So we can't know whether Sharita would agree.

Notice that this is an agreement question. On past LSATs, most questions with two speakers were disagreement questions. Now the LSAC is including both agreement questions and disagreement questions fairly regularly – make sure to read the question stems carefully. I got a question wrong once because I chose a “disagree” answer on an agreement question.

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1. Sharita doesn't mention feeding stray cats.
2. CORRECT. Sharita strongly implies this – otherwise why would she recommend neutering? Neutering reduces the number of cats.Chad lists the ways that stray cats cause problems, and he recommends not feeding them. So presumably he agrees that there are too many.

   There is some small amount of doubt whether they agree – Sharita isn't explicit in saying that there ought to be fewer strays. But this is just a 'most supports' question, so doubt is allowed.

3. Sharita doesn't mention whether stray cats pose a risk to anyone.
4. Sharita doesn't mention disease.
5. Sharita doesn't mention feeding stray cats.

Hi, I'm Graeme Blake

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