LSAT 82, Logical Reasoning II, Q22, LSATHacks

QUESTION TEXT: Newspaper: Increases in produce prices apparently have…

QUESTION TYPE: Weaken

CONCLUSION: Higher produce prices made people plant gardens.

REASONING: Produce prices are up this year, and so are retail seed sales at two large retail seed companies.

ANALYSIS: This sounds like a good argument, but the author makes an improper comparison. They argue that overall retail seed/garden demand is up, but what is their evidence? Sales at two large companies are up.

That’s persuasive, but two large companies are not the whole retail seed market. So, one way to weaken the argument would be to show that these two companies are not representative of overall market sales. Remember, we have no evidence about personal gardens directly. We only have this evidence from the two retail seed companies.

Note: it’s a reasonable assumption that retail seeds are mostly bought by people with backyard gardens. Farmers wouldn’t buy retail seeds. They would get wholesale seeds. I first though the price rise might have been due to farmers and thus also the cause of the produce rise, but that doesn’t really make sense for retail seeds.

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1. It doesn’t matter why produce has gotten more expensive. It only matters what effect this has on consumers.
   E.g. if Lettuce triples in price, you will buy less lettuce. It doesn’t matter to you whether the rise is due to fuel costs or crop failure.
2. This answer mixes up timeframes. The argument is comparing this year to last year, a short run trend. Whereas this answer compares this year to decades ago, a long run trend. Consider the following average garden size:

   1950: 200 square meters
   last year: 10 square meters
   this year: 15 square meters

   It’s true that garden sizes are way down from 1950. But….the 50% increase from last year is nonetheless very significant! So, this answer is consistent with a massive increase in gardening demand in recent years.

   I’ll admit I found this answer extremely tempting. I thought it showed the correlation didn’t hold on a longer timeframe. My mistake was not realizing that it is only the shorter timeframes which matter for this answer, changes in the past 2-3 years. That’s what affect changes in prices today.

3. This strengthens the argument: it shows there is a high demand for gardens! This reduces the possibility that retail seed prices went up for some reason unrelated to gardening.
4. This answer is entirely irrelevant, since we don’t know if an economic downturn is happening! We also don’t know whether produce price rises are necessarily related to a downtown one way or another. (Though we’d probably expect them to fall in a downturn, suggesting a downturn is not happening and this answer doesn’t apply)
5. CORRECT. This argument is about the sales of retail seed companies. The sales of two companies went up. The argument takes that to mean total retail seed sales went up across the whole market.

   This answer provides a strong alternate possibility: a large company went bankrupt, and the two remaining large companies took over its market share. So, their sales went up, but overall market sales might not be up. They could even be down.

Recap: The question begins with “Newspaper: Increases in produce prices apparently have”. It is a Weaken question. Learn more about LSAT Weaken questions in our guide to LSAT Logical Reasoning question types.

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