Logical ReasoningDifficulty: Hard

PT132 S2 Q16 Explanation

Tissue biopsies taken on

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

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Full official LSAT questions are available through LawHub. This page provides LSAT Lab's explanation, strategy, and review tools without republishing the full official question.

Stimulus

Tissue biopsies taken on patients who have undergone throat surgery show that those who snored frequently were significantly more likely to have serious abnormalities in their throat muscles than those who snored rarely or not can damage the throat of the snorer.

What this question is testing

Strengthen

Your task

Find the choice that makes the argument's conclusion more likely to be true.

Common trap

Answers that are consistent with the argument but add no real support, or that strengthen a claim the argument doesn't make.

Winning move

Locate the gap between evidence and conclusion, then pick the choice that closes it.

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

The question
16.

Which one of the following, if true, most strengthens

Answer choices

  1. If Anything, Weakens1% picked this

    The study relied on the subjects' self-reporting to determine whether or not

    Self-reporting is far from the most trustworthy type of data gathering, so if anything this would just make us have more qualms about the study being relied on.

  2. No Impact10% picked this

    The patients' throat surgery was not undertaken to treat abnormalities in

    Why they had the surgery won't clear up the causal connection (if any) between snoring and throat abnormalities.

  3. Too Weak11% picked this

    All of the test subjects were of similar age and weight and in similar

    This is better than nothing, but not as powerful as the correct answer. This helps us to eliminate some other possible alternate explanations in the data by making the subjects seem pretty fair to compare.

  4. No Impact9% picked this

    People who have undergone throat surgery are no more likely to snore than people who have

    This rules out the idea that throat surgery is a cause of snoring, but we were never worried about that. - first of all, everyone in this study had throat surgery, so that wouldn't possibly be an explanation for why some of them snore but others don't. - the snoring was presumably something these patients already had before they came in for throat surgery

  5. Correct70% picked this

    The abnormalities in the throat muscles discovered in the study do

    Why this is right

    Yup, this just Rules Out the reverse causality explanation we considered (What if having a throat abnormality is what causes you to snore?) When an author assumes from a correlation between X and Y that X causes Y, we want to always consider the possibility that Y causes X (or that a related factor Z is really the causal agent). When we're strengthening correlation-to-causality arguments, one way to do so is by ruling out reverse causality or ruling out some third factor that is really the cause.

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

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