LSAT 81, Logical Reasoning I, Q3, LSATHacks

QUESTION TEXT: Reviewer: Almost all books that offer management…

QUESTION TYPE: Sufficient Assumption

CONCLUSION: The advice in management books isn’t useful for most managers.

Conclusion as a drawn statement: Managers (most)—> management books not useful

REASONING: 

• Management books (most)—> CEO perspective
• Managers (most)—> not CEOs and different perspective

ANALYSIS: I drew the statements above as “most” statements, as that’s how they’re phrased. Even “almost” all can be translated to “most” on the LSAT.

On some sufficient assumption questions, you can just mechanically reach the conclusion by splitting it apart and filling in the evidence to spot the gap. I don’t think you can do that here. 

Instead, what you should do is just look at the second half of the conclusion, and think “we have to get here”. So, we have to conclude “management books are not useful”. So, we need a statement that says “If X —> management books are not useful”

We don’t know what X is, but it will probably be a statement describing managers. We know from the evidence that most managers are not CEOs and lack their perspective. So, we can guess that the answer will be some version of: “If you lack a CEO’s perspective, then books written from that perspective will not be useful to you”

Note that only the correct answer talks about the usefulness of advice. So you could have picked it simply by noting that the conclusion must somehow lead to advice not being useful.

___________

1. This tells us that management advice books share something with all advice books: they don’t have the perspective of the audience. But, this doesn’t tell us whether those books are useful nonetheless.
2. This may seem tempting, but:
   1. The argument is only talking about managers. It isn’t talking about “people who read management advice books”
   2. Even if they aspire to be CEO’s, managers lack the CEO perspective. It’s not clear whether “wanting to be a CEO” is significant.
3. So? It’s still true that most managers are not CEOs, and don’t have their perspective.
4. CORRECT. If this is true, then it’s devastating for management books. They’re written in the CEO perspective, and most managers lack that perspective. According to this answer, those books therefore won’t be useful for those managers.
5. The argument wasn’t about which books managers prefer. It’s about which books they find useful.

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