LR Question 13 Explanation
QUESTION TEXT: Columnist: Computer voice-recognition technology…
QUESTION TYPE: Necessary Assumption
CONCLUSION: Voice recognition technology won’t accurate transcribe words until it can recognize and use grammatical and semantic word relations.
REASONING: Computer voice recognition tech can’t recognize homophones.
ANALYSIS: On necessary assumption questions with two sentences, the author will generally need to assume that the thing in the first sentence is related to the thing in the second.
It’s that easy! Just look for the answer with the both terms “homophones” and “grammatical and semantic”.
….or is it that easy? LSAC has been getting trickier, and on this question, they actually include two answers with both those words. Drat. So, to solve this question, you do actually have figure out the relationship between these words. But, narrowing things to two words is still a big win.
Basically, lack of homophone recognition is the problem. The author is saying that grammatical semantic stuff is the solution. So, if we can solve teh problem, we must have the solution, and so the right answer should say:
Tech recognize homophones ➞ Tech recognize grammar semantic blah blah
(You don’t need to understand words to get the structural relationship. Separating the two is a key LSAT skill)
___________
- CORRECT. See the analysis above. This mentions both terms, and correctly has homophones as the sufficient condition. (i.e. it has them as the problem to be solved)
- This answer is sort of a sufficient assumption, in that it proves the conclusion. But we’re looking for a necessary assumption. The author was only saying that voice recognition wouldn’t improve without grammatical recognition. It wasn’t saying it would improve with them.
- This answer is about what humans can do. But the stimulus is about what computers can do. Humans and computers are very different, so info about humans doesn’t really tell us anything about computers.
- This has the right terms, but gets them backwards. It maps to “Recognize grammatical ➞ distinguish homophones”
Homophones were the problem to be solved, so they should be the sufficient condition.
“Unless” is a necessary condition indicator. The words that follow unless are necessary. Note that unless sentences are reversible. So both of these sentences have the same meaning!
1. You are not a cat unless you have a tail
2. Unless you have a tail, you are not a cat
In both cases, “tail”, which follows unless, is the necessary condition. Cat ➞ Tail - This doesn’t matter. Spellcheck of written text is fundamentally different from spoken text. Homophones are hard for voice recognition because they sound different. Homophones wouldn’t be hard to tell apart in writing. e.g. Their and there are homophones.
Recap: The question begins with “Columnist: Computer voice-recognition technology”. It is a Necessary Assumption question. Learn how to master LSAT Necessary questions on the LSAT Logical Reasoning question types page.
Hi Graeme, first off thank you so much for these explanations–they have been of phenomenal help in my LR prep journey.
Based on this question, I would like to ask a more generic question: if the conclusion is a conditional statement A->B, as is the case in this question, should we generally just treat the necessary condition B as the conclusion that will be “connected” in a conditional statement (i.e. NA or SA) to whatever element is relevant in the premises? As far as I went with your approach in this question, that’s how I generalized it. Thank you in advance.
Thanks, glad the explanations help!
To answer your question, I think that’s a decent shorthand way of working with it, though there could be exceptions. Here, a more rigorous way of looking at it would be that the reasoning says something about voice recognition and the conclusion says another thing.
So the answer takes the two things mentioned by the conclusion and reasoning which are different. Hope that helps!
Voice tech —> no homophones
Voice tech —> grammatical and semantic