Logical ReasoningDifficulty: Medium

PT104 S1 Q22 Explanation

Some people believe that saying

A free, expert breakdown of this official LSAT Logical Reasoning question.

TopicsMust be True

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Stimulus

Some people believe that saying that an organization is hierarchical says everything there is to say about how that organization operates. All bureaucratically controlled organizations are hierarchical. Yet the Public Works Department, although most other bureaucratically controlled organizations operate.

What this question is testing

Must be True

Your task

Break the argument into its conclusion and evidence, then do exactly what the question stem asks with that structure.

Common trap

Answers that sound relevant to the topic but don't connect to the argument's actual reasoning.

Winning move

Predict what a right answer must do, then test each choice against the conclusion-evidence gap.

Reading along? Open the full official question in LawHub — we show a fragment here and keep the reasoning in our own words.

The question
22.

If the statements above are true, which one of the following must also be true on the

Answer choices

  1. Unsupported Comparison6% picked this

    The Public Works Department operates more like a nonbureaucratically controlled organization than like a

    We know PWD is different from most other bureaucracies, but we don't know in what way. We can't say that it's different in that it's more dissimilar to non-bureaucracies. It might be different in that it's more similar to non-b's.

  2. Reversed Logic2% picked this

    Any organization that is hierarchical is

    This just reverses the conditional we were given that said, BC ? H

  3. Too Strong: nothing can be concluded10% picked this

    From the fact that a given organization is hierarchical nothing can reliably be concluded about

    We know "some people" are wrong to think, "Once you know an org is hierarchical, you know everything about how it operates". So we're saying, "Nuh-uh. You don't know everything about how it operates". But this answer goes much farther and says, "Nuh-uh. You know nothing about how it operates."

  4. Correct73% picked this

    Not all hierarchical organizations operate in the

    Why this is right

    We know the PWD operates differently from other bureaucratically controlled orgs, and we know all of those bureaucratically controlled orgs are hierarchical. So this proves that some hierarchical orgs operate differently from others. They can't all be identical, or else PWD would be identical to "most other bureaucratically controlled orgs".

    Skill tested: Must be True · how this choice captures the argument's function is the move to repeat next time.

  5. Too Strong: nothing to do9% picked this

    Whether or not an organization is bureaucratically controlled has nothing to do with how

    This basically contradicts our conditional, which says that if an organization is bureaucratically controlled, then it's hierarchical, and being hierarchical probably has something to do with how that organization operates. Our inference was that "being hierarchical doesn't tell a complete picture of how the organization operates".

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