LSAT 142 | Section 4 | Logical Reasoning: Q12

LR Question 12 Explanation

QUESTION TEXT: Prime minister: Our nation’s government should…

QUESTION TYPE: Paradox

PARADOX:

• All people are equal.
• Yet it’s somehow more important to satisfy the people of our country.

ANALYSIS: This is both a paradox question and a principle question. We only know the two things above.

The only way to resolve this dilemma is to have a principle that somehow says countries should satisfy their own needs first.

___________

1. This tells us when not to satisfy needs. We’re trying to show that the country should satisfy its own needs.
2. This gives us a necessary condition for satisfying your own country’s needs. That’s useless. It doesn’t help prove that the country should satisfy its own needs.
3. This doesn’t help. The stimulus says that all people’s needs are objectively the same. So this principle doesn’t let us give priority to one group over the other.
4. CORRECT. The stimulus says that everyone’s needs are equally important. This principle tells us what to do in that case: governments should satisfy the needs of their own people.
5. This is useless. We don’t know if there are no other ways for a country’s people’s needs to be satisfied, so this principle doesn’t do anything.