Logical Reasoning

PT112 · S1 · Q16 A number of measures indicate

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A number of measures indicate the viability of a nation’s economy.

Information

The most significant indicators of an economy's viability are level and rate of growth of aggregate output.

Unemployment and inflation rates are also important.

Pivot (but) Switz, Autria, Israel, Ireland, Denmark, and Finland all have viable economies, but none has a very large population.

Switzerland / Austria = 7 million Israel / Ireland / Denmark / Finland = less than 2 million

Evaluate

There doesn't seem to be any Conditional Logic or Causality in this paragraph. The last two ideas about population size are a little Math-y, but they pretty much would just mean calculating 1/4 of 7 million, which LSAT wouldn't make us do (too ugly).

We have some Comparative stuff and a one Pivot.

Maybe they'll say something like, .

Goal

It's hard to have a prediction here, so we should just be wary of strong wording and pick the most supportable claim.

16.

Which one of the following is most strongly supported by the information above?

  1. A nation’s economic viability is

    Too Strong: independent of

    To say that X is independent of Y means that "X has nothing to do with Y". We can tell that economic viability is not exclusively based on population, since the passage provides examples of more populous and less populous countries that are each viable. But it's too much to say that population has nothing to do with economic viability. It's very possible that at the extremes, an incredibly sparse population or overly dense population could have issues with economic viability.

    22% picked this

  2. Having a population larger than

    Too Strong: ensures

    We definitely can't derive this crazy strong universal claim just from the handful of countries we heard about. This is saying that "every single nation with a population larger than 7 million will be viable".

    0% picked this

  3. Correct

    Economic viability does not require

    Why this is right

    This is incredibly weak, and thus attractive, wording. To prove that "X does not require Y", we just need one example where X is true but Y isn't. Do we have an example where a nation is economically viable but doesn't have a population of at least seven million? Yup, we have four examples in fact: Israel, Ireland, Denmark, and Finland.

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

    73% picked this

  4. A nation’s population is the

    Too Strong: most significant

    We were told that level and rate of growth of aggregate output are the most significant contributors to economic viability. This answer is tossing a word salad by combining that with population, since population was elsewhere discussed. But we have no evidence that population is an important factor when it comes to economic viability, since we're offered examples of countries with very different population sizes (two of them are 4x more populous than the others) and yet all of them are viable.

    2% picked this

  5. A nation’s population affects the

    Unsupported Causal Claim

    This is just like (D), in the sense that it's acting like population is a big causal factor when it comes to economic viability. We don't know if population is a causal factor at all. We have viable countries that are big and small. There's no way we can derive any comparative idea about population's causal effect on unemployment/inflation vs. its effect on level and rate of growth of aggregate output.

    3% picked this

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