LSAT 148 | Section 4 | Logical Reasoning: Q10

LR Question 10 Explanation

QUESTION TEXT: Farmer: Agricultural techniques such as crop rotation…

QUESTION TYPE: Strengthen

CONCLUSION: Generally, only government research will investigate agricultural techniques that don’t use commercial products.

REASONING: Non-commercial agricultural techniques such as crop rotation might be just as good as commercial techniques such as pesticides. But, no private for-profit company will sponsor research unless that research is likely to lead to products.

ANALYSIS: I found this to be an unusually tricky question. I first mistakenly picked A, as I had prephrased that the answer would address whether the government did such research. And I also think E is a very tempting trap answer.

It’s important to keep your mind open when going through answers. Even if an answer seems extremely good, I always look at all of them and make sure I know roughly what each answer means.

So, the actual flaw here is a false dichotomy. The farmer assumes that research is only done by companies or governments. They forget that universities, non-profits and private individuals also do research: maybe these groups account for most non-commercial research. After all, we don’t know anything about governments: they might also mostly stick to commercial research.

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1. I think this is a necessary assumption for the argument. If this isn’t true, the argument falls apart. But it doesn’t strengthen much on its own. Necessary assumptions are usually pretty bare minimum. If you say “I’ll get a good LSAT score because I breathe”, you have identified a necessary condition, but you haven’t strengthened the argument very much.
    
   I don’t know why, but I initially found this answer very tempting. This shows why you should read all the answers before moving on. I saw C was better as soon as I read it.
2. Why would this matter? The author wasn’t saying that non-commercial solutions were common. They were simply making a claim about who would even investigate such solutions.
3. CORRECT. The argument set up a false binary: the farmer assumed that research was done only by companies or by governments. But, much research is done by private individuals or universities. This answer eliminates the possibility that those organizations are also doing non-commercial agricultural research.
4. This is irrelevant. The argument is only about research that doesn’t use commercial products. And in that market, we know that companies don’t sponsor research.
5. This is a very tempting trap. The problem is that it doesn’t tell us how much government research there is. Even though almost all government research is non-commercial, it could be true that only 5% of non-commercial research is done by the government. The rest could be done by universities and private groups such as the Gates foundation.

Recap: The question begins with “Farmer: Agricultural techniques such as crop rotation”. It is a Strengthen question. To practice more Strengthen questions, have a look at the LSAT Questions by Type page.