LSAT 140 | Section 3 | Logical Reasoning: Q10

LR Question 10 Explanation

QUESTION TEXT: Company president: Whenever you subcontract the…

QUESTION TYPE: Must Be True

FACTS:

1. Subcontract ➞ Lose control
2. Contrapositive: Lose control ➞ Subcontract
3. The company only subcontracts with companies that maintain control

ANALYSIS: We have a conditional statement (facts 1 and 2) and a fact (fact 3). You can combine them. The stimulus says that the companies the president uses for outsourcing don’t lose control. According to the contrapositive above, those companies therefore don’t subcontract.

Several wrong answers bring in outside assumptions about outsourcing being poor quality. The stimulus doesn’t support this. If you outsource, you lose control over quality, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the quality is lower. It just means you don’t control whether or not quality is high.

___________

1. CORRECT. This must be true. If the subcontractors were allowed to subcontract, then they would lose some control. Since the subcontractors don’t lose control, we know they don’t subcontract.
2. The stimulus never talks about disappointment. This answer is trying to make you bring in outside assumptions about outsourcing and poor quality.
3. This has to be false. If the company’s president wanted full control, then they wouldn’t outsource. You always lose control when you outsource.
4. This is similar to B. This might be true in real life, but nothing in the stimulus tells us that subcontracting leads to poor quality. We only know it leads to loss of control, which is not the same thing.
5. Careful. Loss of control doesn’t necessarily mean loss of quality. We only know subcontracting leads to less control.
   Also note that this says uniformly better quality. That’s a strong statement – it means every single in house product is better (i.e. there are zero duds).

Recap: The question begins with “Company president: Whenever you subcontract the “. It is a Must Be True question. To practice more Must Be True questions, have a look at the LSAT Questions by Type page.