Few animals brave the midday

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

TopicsParadox

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Stimulus

Few animals brave the midday heat of the Sahara desert. An exception is the silver ant, which chooses this time of day to leave its nest and scout for food, typically the corpses of heat-stricken animals. Even the silver ant, they can become victims of the heat themselves.

What this question is testing

Paradox

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

Which one of the following, if true, LEAST helps to explain the silver ant’s choice

Answer choices

Helps Explain5% picked this
The chief predators of the silver ant must take cover from the
The silver ant chooses to scout for food during the midday heat because it's safer! Their predators aren't out and about.
5%
Helps Explain8% picked this
The cues that silver ants use to navigate become less reliable as
The silver ant chooses to scout for food during the midday heat because it's easier! The midday sun helps them navigate. They're more likely to get lost if they wait until the cooler afternoon hours.
8%
Helps Explain6% picked this
Other scavengers remove any remaining corpses as soon as the temperature begins to drop
The silver ant chooses to scout for food during the midday heat because it's when the food is still available. If they wait until later, then other scavengers will have beat them to the delicious corpses.
6%
Helps Explain7% picked this
The temperature inside the silver ants’ nests often exceeds the surface temperature during the hottest
The silver ant chooses to scout for food during the midday heat because it's cooler than where they live! Their nest is even hotter, so might as well go scout for food.
7%
Correct74% picked this
Silver ants cool themselves by climbing onto small pieces of dried vegetation to take advantage
Why this is right
This tells us how the silver ant cools itself off, but it has nothing to do with midday. They could cool themselves off this way at any point of day, so this doesn't offer any reason why they would choose to go out at the hottest point of the day. We might be thinking that this shows how they could cope with the blazing heat, but "random light breezes" doesn't sound like something that happens very frequently, so this doesn't sound like a very viable way of staying cool in blazing heat that dissuades most other animals.
Skill tested: Paradox · how this choice captures the argument's function is the move to repeat next time.
74%

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