Logical ReasoningDifficulty: Hard

PT109 S4 Q18 Explanation

Coach: Our team has often been

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

TopicsFlaw

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Stimulus

Coach: Our team has often been criticized for our enthusiasm in response to both our successes and our opponents’ failures. But this behavior is hardly unprofessional, as our critics have claimed. On the contrary, if one looks at the professionals in this sport, one will find that they the team alone and let the players enjoy the game.

What this question is testing

Flaw

Your task

Describe the reasoning error the argument actually commits.

Common trap

Answers that name a real logical flaw the argument doesn't actually make.

Winning move

Articulate the gap in the reasoning yourself, then match it to the choice that describes that 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
18.

The coach’s argument is most vulnerable to the charge

Answer choices

  1. Opposite5% picked this

    misleadingly equates enthusiasm with unethical

    The coach's argument is equating enthusiasm with professional play. (equating is too strong a word, but the author is acting like effusive, emotionally demonstrative victory celebrations are professional, not unethical)

  2. Correct49% picked this

    misinterprets the critics’ claim that the team

    Why this is right

    The coach is interpreting "unprofessional" to mean, "The professionals wouldn't do it." But the critics presumably meant "unprofessional", like, "This is not respectful".

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

  3. Wrong Flaw26% picked this

    too quickly generalizes from the sport at one level to the sport at

    "A hasty generalization" is another way of describing the famous Sampling flaw. The author is sampling, in the sense that he's thinking "If effusive victory dances are professional in professional sports, then they are professional in our amateur version of the sport". But our problem with the author's logic isn't that he compared the pros to the amateurs and assumed they were relevantly similar, when they might not be. Instead, our problem was that he thought we could say that "if professionals do it, then it's professional."

  4. Out of Scope: "blame"19% picked this

    shifts the blame for the team’s behavior to

    We can't say that the coach is shifting the "blame", since the coach doesn't think his players are doing anything wrong. You wouldn't "blame" someone for acting professionally.

  5. Wrong Argument1% picked this

    takes everyone on the team to have performed the actions of

    This is potentially a flaw in the critics' argument. If they're saying "We saw a couple of your players raucously celebrating and jeering at their vanquished opponents. MAN, is your team unprofessional", then that would be taking the actions of a few to be indicative of everyone on the team. The coach isn't doing anything like that.

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