LSAT 143 | Section 3 | Logical Reasoning: Q15

LR Question 15 Explanation

QUESTION TEXT: Ninety percent of recent car buyers say safety was an…

QUESTION TYPE: Sufficient Assumption

CONCLUSION: The car buyers were wrong to say that safety was important to them.

REASONING: Ninety percent of car buyers said safety was important. Half of the car buyers looked at objective sources. The others half only looked at ads and marketing material.

ANALYSIS: We can conclude two things:

• At least 40% of car buyers only looked at promotional material.
• Promotional material is not objective.

We know the second point is true because the argument says half looked at objective material, and “the others” looked only at promotional material. So that material is not objective.

However, this doesn’t let us conclude that these buyers didn’t care about safety. We need to connect the evidence to the conclusion:

How to fill gap: Didn’t consult objective material ➞ Safety not important

Normally I would draw sufficient assumption questions. However this one was easier to reason out without drawings, apart from the single conditional I drew that connects things.

Note: You might think it’s impossible to care about safety without consulting objective materials. But this is an unfounded assumption.

You might want to know, for example, that a car has airbags, seat-belts and antilock breaks. Promotional materials are a good source of information for that kind of knowledge. They may not be optimal for safety knowledge, but they do provide some information.

___________

1. Who cares about the most important factor? Consumers weren’t claiming that safety was the most important factor.
2. So? Just because advertising is incomplete doesn’t mean the people using it don’t care about safety.
   You can care about safety while doing a poor job of investigating it.
3. So? “Do not necessarily” is weak language. It only lets us prove that it’s possible that people were lying. But the conclusion is that people were definitely 100% wrong to say they cared about safety.
4. So? This still doesn’t get to the central point. Consumers might reasonably believe they could care about safety without looking at objective materials.
   For instance if consumers just want to know that a car has safety features like antilock breaks and airbags, they could learn that information purely from promotional materials.
5. CORRECT. This fills the gap. It takes what we know about some consumers, and lets us conclude they don’t care about safety.
   Cares about safety ➞ consult objective material
   consult objective material ➞ cares about safety