LSAT 150 | Section 2 | Logical Reasoning: Q9

LR Question 9 Explanation

QUESTION TEXT: Yu: The menu at Jason’s Restaurant states that no food…

QUESTION TYPE: Weaken

CONCLUSION: Jason’s Restaurant must have at least some food grown with chemical pesticides.

REASONING: Jason gets his food from Kelly’s grocery. Some products at Kelly’s grocery comes from MegaFarm, which uses pesticides.

ANALYSIS: This is an incredibly stupid argument. Here’s an analogy:

You must have at least some rat poison in your body. I know this because you get your food at the grocery store, and the grocery store sells rat poison.

The flaw is that it’s possible you don’t buy (or don’t eat) the rat poison. Likewise, it’s possible that Jason simply doesn’t buy the MegaFarm food, and buys organic food instead.

___________

1. It doesn’t matter if Jason is aware of the pesticides. If he unknowingly buys Megafarm foods, then he is still using pesticide food.
2. This doesn’t tell us whether Jason has food products that were grown with pesticides. The argument says that Jason’s Restaurant must have pesticides. To undermine it, we need to refute this.
3. CORRECT. The MegaFarm produce at Kelly’s Grocery doesn’t matter if Jason avoids it. The labels demonstrate that Jason probably knows his food is pesticide-free because he checks the labels.
4. This tells us the pesticides are approved as safe. But that’s not what the argument is about. It’s about whether there are any pesticides used at all, even safe ones.
5. This is like answer A. It doesn’t matter whether Jason knows he buys pesticides. It only matters whether he does do so.

Recap: The question begins with “Yu: The menu at Jason’s Restaurant states that no food”. It is a Weaken question. Learn how to master LSAT Weaken questions on the LSAT Logical Reasoning question types page.