LR Question 10 Explanation
QUESTION TEXT: Actor: Bertolt Brecht’s plays are not genuinely…
QUESTION TYPE: Sufficient Assumption
CONCLUSION: Bertolt Brecht’s plays are not successful dramas.
Brecht play ➞ successful
REASONING: In successful plays, audiences must care what happens to at least some characters. In Brecht’s plays, it’s hard to figure out anyone’s personality.
Brecht play ➞ personality
successful ➞ care
ANALYSIS: Sufficient assumption questions are very formulaic. Start by taking the conclusion, and splitting it far apart.
Brecht play successful
Then, attach the reasoning onto these terms. I’ve taken the contrapositive of one to do so (care ➞ successful)
Brecht play ➞ personality care ➞ successful
You can probably see the gap. To prove this argument correct, we have to show that if audiences can’t figure out personalities, then they won’t care about characters.
___________
- CORRECT. This matches the gap in the diagram above.
- This just strings together two concepts that were in a single premise. These words are found in the second sentence.
The more you see a word or idea, the more you like it – it’s a known psychological bias. Watch out for answers that merely reuse words that were in the stimulus. - The LSAT uses “directly proportional” in wrong answers fairly frequently. Directly proportional means: if one thing goes up 10%, then another thing also goes up by exactly 10%.
Direct proportionality is almost never relevant in an argument. Do you care if your LSAT score is directly proportional to law school application success? - Notice that the second sentence already says that both audiences and actors can’t understand Brecht’s personalities. This answer just adds an irrelevant rule that would only affect plays other than Brecht’s.
- “Personality ➞ succeed” is what this answer says. This doesn’t help us prove what plays don’t succeed. To prove that, you need “not succeed” to be a necessary condition.
More Resources for Sufficient Assumption Questions
- Conditional Reasoning Article: Learn about conditional statements.
- LR Diagrams Guide: Learn how to draw LR diagrams.
- Intro to Conditional Reasoning: Learn conditional reasoning basics.
- Intro Course lesson: This intro course lesson covers Sufficient Assumption questions.
- Mastery Seminar lesson: This LR Mastery seminar lesson covers sufficient assumption questions.
For me the word “readily” threw me off here. I was drawn to A but the passage doesn’t say anything about audience’s “readily” discerning personalities. I do see it’s by the far the only one that fits, but still, that “readily”…
Totally fair, but I don’t actually think readily changes the logic in any meaningful way. The stimulus says audiences find it difficult at best to discern personalities, which implies they can’t readily do so. So I find A’s use of “readily” consistent with the stimulus, it just restates the idea more directly. Good that you understand why it’s correct and the others aren’t though, that’s the most important part!
Thanks, yes that totally makes sense.
Could the explanation you gave for C here be used to eliminate answer choice E on question 13 of this section? On question 13 (although different question type than this one), answer choice E talked about proportionality. I remembered what you had said about C in this question and immediately eliminated E on that question
Yup, proportionality almost never matters, unless there is some strong reason that it should. I perhaps should have mentioned that in the explanation: https://lsathacks.com/explanations/lsat-preptest-73/logical-reasoning-1/q-13/
Actually, just edited it to include that, thanks.
Though with a flaw question, the real reason the answer isn’t right is that the author didn’t make the flaw. It *would* be a flaw to assume prisoner numbers are proportional, but the author didn’t make that assumption.