LSAT 154 | Section 1 | Logical Reasoning: Q19

LR Question 19 Explanation

QUESTION TEXT: Medical researcher: At the Flegco Corporation, all employees…

QUESTION TYPE: Flawed Reasoning

CONCLUSION: Back belts don’t help prevent injuries.

REASONING: Employees wearing back belts have higher odds of back injuries. All Flegco employees that lift heavy things wear back belts.

ANALYSIS: This is a dumb argument, and an LSAC classic. Consider this parallel argument:

“Hard hats supposedly help people’s heads avoid blows. Yet construction workers wear hard hats and have more head injuries. Clearly, hard hats don’t work”

Both arguments ignore that you may only wear a back belt/hard hat if you have high risk of a problem! The item helps reduce the problem, but you’re still in a high risk group.

___________

1. CORRECT. See the discussion above. This addresses risk. Maybe without back belts, you have 3x higher risk of back injury by lifting heavy things. After wearing a back belt, this reduces your risk to 2x. But we still expect more injuries. Back belts help, but can’t fully address the higher risk.
2. The argument is only comparing Flegco employees to other Flegco employees in different roles. People at other companies are irrelevant.
3. This answer misrepresents the argument. It suggests the author said that back belts cause back injury. But that’s not something the author did.
    
   You might have picked this because you thought weight belts were correlated with dangerous activities. This is true, but, answer A is the answer for that line of thought. The author’s flaw was actually that he missed the correlation, whereas this answer is about noticing a correlation but falsely believing it implies causation.
    
   Example of flaw: Back belts are associated with back injury. So, back belts must cause back injury.

4. The author didn’t suffer this confusion. Frankly, these are weird things to mix up:

   • not causally contribute to a certain effect: must not damage your back
   • must causally contribute to preventing that effect: must prevent back damage

   The author didn’t make this confusion, and they argued that back belts do not prevent back damage. Further, the author never mentioned the idea that back belts could hurt your back, either for it or against it.

   Example of flaw: Alcohol doesn’t damage your eyes, so drinking alcohol must prevent eye damage.

5. This describes mixing up necessary and sufficient. That’s a different flaw.
    
   Example of flaw: Dogs bring happiness. So anyone who is happy must have a dog.

Recap: The question begins with “Medical researcher: At the Flegco Corporation, all employees”. It is a Flawed Reasoning question. Learn how to master LSAT Flaw questions on the LSAT Logical Reasoning question types page.