Logical ReasoningDifficulty: Easy

PT117 S4 Q5 Explanation

Barr: The National Tea Association

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

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Stimulus

Barr: The National Tea Association cites tea’s recent visibility in advertising and magazine articles as evidence of tea’s increasing popularity. However, a neutral polling company, the Survey Group, has tracked tea sales at numerous stores for the last 20 years and has found no change in the amount tea is no more popular now than it ever was.

What this question is testing

Weaken

Conclusion

Barr is pushing back on the Tea Association. The Association says tea is getting more popular (look at all the ads and magazine pieces). Barr says no — actual sales numbers from a neutral source have not budged in 20 years, so popularity has not budged either.

Evaluate

Barr is leaning entirely on the Survey Group's sales numbers. The whole argument rises or falls on whether those numbers really tell us about tea drinking nationwide.

Think of it like this: if you wanted to know whether running shoes are getting more popular in the country, and you only checked sales at stores in one snowy mountain town, you would miss the trend. The data is real, but it is not painting the whole picture.

Goal

Find an answer that gives us a reason to suspect the Survey Group's sample is not actually capturing the national picture — or some other reason their flat-sales finding does not prove tea is no more popular.

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

The question
5.

Which one of the following, if true, most seriously weakens

Answer choices

  1. Out of Scope0% picked this

    The National Tea Association has announced that it plans to carry out its own retail survey

    What the Tea Association plans to do next year has no bearing on whether the Survey Group's past 20 years of data accurately reflect tea popularity. A future survey is not data Barr is using and does not undermine Barr's evidence.

  2. No Impact5% picked this

    A survey by an unrelated polling organization shows that the public is generally receptive to the idea of

    Being "receptive to the idea of trying new types of tea" is not the same as actually buying more tea. Barr's evidence is about sales; this answer is about willingness to try. People can be open to something without actually buying it, so this does not undercut the claim that tea sales — and thus tea popularity — have not changed.

  3. No Impact1% picked this

    The Survey Group is funded by a consortium of consumer

    Barr already calls the Survey Group "a neutral polling company." Saying it is funded by consumer advocacy groups does not show the data is wrong — it just identifies the funder. Without a reason to think those funders biased the sales data, this does nothing to undermine the conclusion that tea sales have been flat.

  4. Correct92% picked this

    The stores from which the Survey Group collected information about tea sales are all located in the same

    Why this is right

    This is the gap. The Survey Group only tracked stores in "the same small region of the country." That makes the sample unrepresentative — flat tea sales in one small region tell us nothing reliable about whether tea is becoming more popular nationally. The whole argument rested on those sales numbers being a good proxy for tea popularity, and this answer shows they are not. The conclusion that tea is no more popular now than it ever was no longer follows.

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

  5. No Impact2% picked this

    Tea has been the subject of an expensive and efficient advertising campaign funded, in part, by

    An expensive, efficient ad campaign tells us about how much the Tea Association is trying to make tea popular — not whether the campaign worked. Barr's evidence (flat sales) actually suggests the opposite: lots of advertising, no change in sales. This is consistent with Barr's position, not against it.

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