LSAT 149 | Section 1 | Logical Reasoning: Q6

LR Question 6 Explanation

QUESTION TEXT: The only vehicles that have high resale…

QUESTION TYPE: Flawed Parallel Reasoning

CONCLUSION: Every well maintained vehicle can sell for a lot.

Well maintained ➞ Sell for a lot

REASONING: Sell for a lot ➞ well maintained

ANALYSIS: This argument mixed up sufficient and necessary. In the reasoning, well maintained is the necessary condition. So while you need well maintained to sell high, we wouldn’t expect a well maintained budget car to necessarily sell for a high price.

To parallel this argument, look for an answer with one conditional statement, and where the author mentions the necessary and tries to prove the sufficient.

___________

1. This is a bad argument, but it’s a different kind of flaw. It’s like saying “Since no child here has had a bath before, none of the children need baths”.
   It’s possible the plants are deprived, and desperately need to be pruned.
2. This is a different flaw. It changes the statement itself: it’s a version of an incorrect negation flaw. Basically the author is assuming that the opposite of something is its polar opposite. There was no negation in the stimulus.
   (Incidentally, this answer has a different flaw: the mediators with the shortest track records are surely new mediators. But new mediators can’t be the worst: to be the worst you need some kind of track record of failure.to)
3. This is a bad argument: millions want to become astronauts, only a tiny number actually do. And this is close to paralleling the stimulus. However, the stimulus didn’t say “maintenance is the most important factor in determining resale value”. It said maintenance guarantees a high resale value. Big difference. This answer isn’t saying everyone who wants to become an astronaut becomes one.
4. CORRECT. I hesitated on this one because it talked about preferences, but the first part is a conditional statement: city dweller ➞ prefer
   The conclusion is prefer ➞ city dweller. So this answer mixes up necessary and sufficient, same as the stimulus. It’s easier to see if you shorten “prefer waterfalls to traffic jams” to “prefer”, as the detail isn’t structurally important.
5. This is a different flaw. There’s no conditional statement here, only a correlation. And, the flaw is: even if you have the least need of health care, you may still need health care. For example, people in good health still get vaccines.

Recap: The question begins with “The only vehicles that have high resale”. It is a Flawed Parallel Reasoning question. Learn more about LSAT Flawed Parallel questions in our guide to LSAT Logical Reasoning question types.