In 1712 the government of Country Y appointed a censor to prohibit the publication of any book critical of Country Y’s government; all new books legally published in the country after 1712 were approved by a censor.
Statements
Conditionals (any, all = Left side, sufficient)
Book critical of → censor supposed to country Y's govt. prohibit its publication
New book legally → approved by censor published after 1712
Comparison (1st censor vs. 2nd censor) Quantitative (1/2 vs. 1/4 vs. same number)
1st censor 2nd censor
same number approved
50% rejected 25% rejected (50% approved) (75% approved)
Evaluate
They've given us a couple conditional and some math facts to work with. The conditionals don't link together. Even though they both discuss the "censor", the first rule would be about whether or not the govt of Y wants the censor to prohibit it. The other rule is about whether or not the censor prohibits it.
We don't know how much the censors actual approvals / prohibitions will line up with the government's intent when they appointed this censor.
The math facts, meanwhile, do combine to tell us something. We see the pivot word but introducing the last math fact. It creates a paradox-like tension. When we see pivot words (on Inference questions) do this sort of thing, we want to pause to try to Reconcile the Pivot.
(Like if I say Marsha just got a raise, yet her salary is the same percent of her rent it was last year .... this creates a tension, which we could mathematically resolve saying that last year her rent increased too)
Given that the 1st censor was rejecting 50% of its submissions, whereas the 2nd censor was rejecting only 25% of the manuscripts she reviewed, how did they end up with the same number of approved manuscripts?
If Mary says no to more people asking her on a date more often than Jane does, but they go on an equal number of dates, that means .... Mary is asked out on dates more than Jane.
In this example, if the 1st censor said no more often but ended up with the same number of approved manuscripts, she must have read through more submissions.
If this math doesn't seem intuitively clear to you, but your spidey-sense tells you that LSAC is trying to test something math-y, then consider throwing some easy numbers on the page.
If both censors read 100 manuscripts, then according to our 1/2 and 1/4 facts, 1st censor -- approved 50, rejected 50 2nd censor -- approved 75, rejected 25
Do these numbers fit the last claim -- the number of books approved was the same?
No, the number approved from the 2nd censor is larger. How would you make it the same?
What if 1st censor read 200 and 2nd censor read 100? 1st censor -- approved 100, rejected 100 2nd censor -- approved 75, rejected 25
Well, that was too far, because now the 1st censor approved more books, but we can see that in order to fix the original mismatch (when 1st censor has fewer approvals), we need to increase the number of submissions for increase the number of submissions that the 1st censor reviewed in order to make the # of books approved equal out.
If you really want to see numbers that work out, consider these: 1st censor (120 submissions) 60 approved, 60 rejected
2nd censor (80 submissions) 60 approved, 20 rejected
Goal
Look for an answer saying something like the 1st censor reviewed more manuscripts than the 2nd censor did.