LR Question 23 Explanation
QUESTION TEXT: Editorial: Teenagers tend to wake up around 8:00 A.M….
QUESTION TYPE: Strengthen
CONCLUSION: Later wakeup times could make driving safer for teenagers.
REASONING: Granville’s high school changed its class start time to 9:30, and the number of teenage driver car accidents in Granville declined.
ANALYSIS: This argument shows a correlation. To strengthen it, we need to eliminate alternate causes, or show a reason that the correlation truly involved a cause.
An alternate cause would be, for example, that a new drunk driving enforcement effort reduced teenage car crashes at night involving alcohol.
Remember, you’re not looking for something that’s true. You are looking for something which addresses driving safety. A lot of the answers are merely in the form of “hmm, that might be true….”
___________
- This shows why teenagers want to sleep in, but it doesn’t tell us anything about driving safety.
- This….makes sense. But it doesn’t address driving safety. We need to know that there will be fewer sleepy teenagers with a later start time, and that their driving will be safer. You’re not looking for an answer that’s “true”. You’re trying to strengthen the argument!
- Like C, this is plausible, but it doesn’t tell us anything about driving safety.
- This weakens the argument. The argument was theorizing that morning accidents would go down (“car accidents involving teenagers driving to school”). So, the argument would be stronger if more teenage car accidents happened in the morning.
- CORRECT. This strengthens the argument by show that without the cause, the effect didn’t occur. If accidents were going down everywhere, then the correlation with the policy was probably a coincidence. Since they went down only in the place with the new policy, then we can be more confident that the policy was the cause.
Recap: The question begins with “Editorial: Teenagers tend to wake up around”. It is a Strengthen question. To practice more Strengthen questions, have a look at the LSAT Questions by Type page.
More Resources for Strengthen Questions
- Intro Course lesson: This intro course lesson covers Strengthen questions.
- Mastery Seminar lesson: This LR Mastery seminar lesson covers strengthen questions.
I think this is a bad question. How can E be right if we have no idea about the policies of other schools. Perhaps other school districts have been starting later the entire time – making this answer choice invalid. We simply don’t know enough about this answer in my opinion.
This is a strengthen question. It doesn’t have to prove the conclusion right 100%. It merely has to support it. E eliminates the possibility that there was an overall declining trend in the region.
Certainly, what you say is possible. But E at least eliminates a swath of scenarios that would weaken the argument.
Note: This is an old comment but I wanted to clarify the point.
I was btwn D and E and neither seemed right to me. I ultimately did not choose E because it used a comparison without saying if this was data during after the implementation or before where the stimulus didn’t mention another town. I also choose D because I thought it could be referring to after the policy change and therefore less accidents in the morning proved it was effective.
E says “during the time” accidents declined in Granville. So that places it while the experiment was going on. The region outside granville is a control group: similar geography/laws, no later school start time, different result.
For D, it says “the car accidents”. You can assume this refers to either the accidents after the change or before. I don’t think it changes the interpretation.