LSAT 146 | Section 2 | Logical Reasoning: Q26

LR Question 26 Explanation

QUESTION TEXT: Winston: The rules for awarding Nobel Prizes stipulate…

QUESTION TYPE: Agreement

ARGUMENTS: Winston says that important scientific results are often the work of four or more people. And yet nobel prize rules say the prizes can be shared by three people at most.

Sanjay says that ,also, some influential scientists die before their work is appreciated, and yet the rules say that prize winners must be living.

ANALYSIS: It sounds as thought Winston and Sanjay agree that the rules aren’t fully fair and don’t fully capture all important scientists’ work.

I found this question surprisingly difficult as I didn’t like the wording of the right answer. It’s an example of how you really are choosing the “best” answer. If you’re down to two, see if one can be clearly eliminated, then pick the other.

Also, this is an agreement question. For years, LSAC only used disagreement questions. I’ve gotten agreement questions wrong before as I picked a disagree answer. Watch out for this on newer tests.

___________

1. Winston doesn’t mentioned deceased people. He also doesn’t say rules should be changed.
2. I found this to be the most tempting answer. The problem is that neither Winston nor Sanjay says what the rules should be or whether they should be changed. The LSAT makes a strict separation between what is true and what should be true. You can’t conclude what ought to be true unless someone says something about it.
3. This is an extreme statement. Taken literally, it would mean the elimination of all Nobel prizes for science! I don’t think either Winston or Sanjay were suggesting that.
4. Neither Winston nor Sanjay’s arguments support this. In fact, they both seem to take it as a given that we can objectively judge scientific merit. “Subjective” refers to a situation where people can completely disagree about whether something has merit. Here, there is no disagreement about merit: it’s just that the rules block some people with merit from being awarded the prize.
5. CORRECT. This is the best answer. I didn’t like the word “inaccurate”, and would have preferred it had it said “sometimes inaccurate” or “incomplete” indicators. But, it is true that both of them think there are some inaccuracies: Winston thinks it cuts off teams of 4+ people, and Sanjay thinks the prizes cut off dead people who contributed a lot.