QUESTION TYPE: Weaken
CONCLUSION: Probably the gold in the artifacts was mined from the ancient mine.
REASONING: The gold in the artifacts had a certain trace element ratio. The gold in the nearby mine has a similar trace element ratio. No other mine we know of has the same trace element ratio.
ANALYSIS: This argument has clearly shown no other mine could produce the gold. But not all gold comes from mines. Sometimes you could just find it lying on the ground, or in rivers.
That’s not common now, as people have found all the easy gold. But remember the Gold Rush? People used to flood to Alaska and California and literally pick gold out of river beds. You don’t always need mines to get at some of the gold in the world, and the conclusion is specific in saying the gold must have been dug from the mine.
All of the wrong answers miss the point. The conclusion is about where the gold originally came from. Who mined it, or where it was used, or when it was used, etc. are not relevant.
Btw, if you find “trace element ratio” confusing, just substitute it with a simpler word. E.g. The gold in the artifacts is green, and the gold in the mine is green. No other known mine has green gold.
This has the same logical structure, and is way easier to understand. “Trace element ratio” is just a property of the gold, so you can substitute it for any other adjective. Viewing things in terms of their grammatical role can help simplify abstract terms. A lot of fancy LSAT words don’t have any structural meaning in the argument, they’re just there to slow you down.
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- CORRECT. This suggests the gold could have come from a nearby riverbed instead. Presumably all of the gold in the underground deposit had a similar trace element ratio, whether it went into a mine or a riverbed. Note that the conclusion specified that the gold must have been dug from the mine. That’s why this answer weakens it.
If you pick up gold from a riverbed, you definitely did not dig the gold up from a mine. It doesn’t matter if the gold originally formed in a mine. This answer proves that the gold wasn’t dug from the mine.
- This is interesting, but irrelevant. It doesn’t matter which humans mined the gold. The stimulus is only about where the gold came from originally.
We might use some gold today that the Romans mine in Spain. The fact that we aren’t Romans doesn’t change the geographical origin of the gold. - Similar to B. It doesn’t matter who took out the gold and when. The stimulus is only about where the gold came from, and how.
- Same as B and C! We only care about where the gold originally came from. Doesn’t matter if it had a few uses before being made into the present artifacts. So, for example:
1. I dig some gold from a mine. I turn it into a gold bar
2. I sell the bar to a merchant who turns it into jewels.
3. Someone buys the jewels, melts them down and makes coinsI could go on for 1000 more transformations over hundreds of years. None of them matter. The gold was dug out of the mine originally and subsequent transformations won’t change that!
- Same as B and C and D!! We only care about where the gold originally came form. It doesn’t matter where it was eventually used.
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