LSAT 148 | Section 4 | Logical Reasoning: Q19

LR Question 19 Explanation

QUESTION TEXT: Employee: The company I work for has installed…

QUESTION TYPE: Parallel Reasoning

CONCLUSION: It is false to say that websites need to be blocked merely because they’re distractions.

REASONING: Windows and nice decorations are also distracting, but no one says that these distractions prevent people from doing their best work.

ANALYSIS: This is an argument by analogy. Notably, the author only implies their conclusion: they don’t state it explicitly.

So, to parallel it, you should skim to find the answers that seem to use analogies, and then focus on those. In particular, the analogies should be used to criticize an opposing position.

Note that the argument has a subtle flaw: there is a difference between distracting sites, and windows. No one spends eight hours a day looking at decorations, but people can easily spend eight hours browsing Reddit and Twitter. The right answer has this same subtle flaw.

I feel my explanations may be lacking here, as to me it was so obvious that an analogy was necessary, and only one answer has an analogy. On that basis, it was hard for me to see how any argument without an analogy was tempting. This is why seeing structure before going to the answers is vital: it helps you see through the clutter of wrong choices.

___________

1. There’s no analogy here. Instead, the author raises a qualification. That’s a different type of argument. (A qualification is if you raise an exception or distinguish a statement in some way such that you can’t say a statement is always true. E.g. It always pays to study. Well, maybe not Art History. The second point is a qualification on the first).
2. CORRECT. This uses an analogy. And, it has the same subtle flaw. High doses of a chemical aren’t quite analogous to prolonged exposure. You probably don’t drink 10 gallons of some obscure chemical, but you might keep an electronic device on you 24/7. So the prolonged exposure is a more realistic risk.
    
   Really though, you could have picked this just by noting that there was an analogy. It’s the only answer that has one.
3. There’s no analogy here! The only parallel factor is “no one claims”. But that’s just a figure of speech, it’s not a structural thing. Here, the claim is just being used to prove a point about Acme itself, rather than about some analogous thing.
4. This seems like a debate, but there actually isn’t one. In the stimulus, the “but” signified “my company is wrong!”. In this case, the but means “the prior claim is correct, and also this further caveat applies”. “But” can mean “and also” in a few cases, when you’re listing reasons something won’t happen. E.g. “You need to brush your teeth to avoid cavities. But you also need to avoid too much sugar.”
5. I’m struggling even to understand this argument. It seems flawed. If an expensive movie and a cheap movie both have the same revenue, then the cheap movie has made more profit. So it is more successful, and this is a good metric. The stimulus had a half decent argument, so the right answer has to have at least some sense to it.

Recap: The question begins with “Employee: The company I work for has”. It is a Parallel Reasoning question. To practice more Parallel Reasoning questions, have a look at the LSAT Questions by Type page.