Logical Reasoning

PT136 · S2 · Q9 In a party game, one person

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In a party game, one person leaves the room with the understanding that someone else will relate a recent dream to the remaining group.

Situation

Eddie leaves the room. He thinks that Marsha is going to tell everyone about a dream she recently had. When he's allowed to return to the room, he tries to figure out what her dream was all about by asking everyone in the room Yes / No questions.

But Marsha never actually told them any dream. They just created some rule for when they'll say Yes / When they'll say no. (e.g. Every 3rd question, say "yes" / If your name starts with a vowel, say "yes")

By piecing together the Yes and No answers that he gets, Eddie actually ends up thinking he has figured out the story, and the story he thinks he's figured out is coherent and ingenious.

Evaluate

When we're asked to listen to a situation / story and then figure out which generalization / proposition it best illustrates or matches, we're hoping to extract from the stimulus some safely worded takeaway.

Most of the wrong answers are too strongly worded. We use our Inference brain and look primarily for Causal or Comparison/Contrast language to figure out what sort of synthesis we could say.

Here, there's a contrast (dramatic irony) between Eddie and the rest of the partygoers. They know there is no actual story, and are just giving random Yes/No answers. He thinks there is an actual story, and the one he is guessing is surprisingly coherent.

Goal

Look for an answer that Straddles the Pivot, that synthesizes what's going on with the partygoers with the surprising effect it's having on Eddie.

9.

The example presented above most closely conforms to which one of the following propositions?

  1. Correct

    The presumption that something has

    Why this is right

    This has lovable safe language "X can lead to Y". It ends up being the most supportable answer, but it's kind of obnoxious. Eddie presumed that Marsha had actually related a dream to the remaining partygoers. Does that mean that Eddie presumed that Marsha's dream story had order and coherence? No, not really. It's a dream, after all. The dream stories I've heard from people are often nonsensical and break all kinds of rules. But LSAT wants us to be thinking, "Eddie thinks Marsha told a dream ... dreams are like stories that just didn't happen ... Eddie thinks that the partygoers were told a story with order and coherence". Because Eddie thought a real dream story was told, he interprets the random Yes/No answers given by the partygoers in a way that results in his version of the dream having surprising "coherence".

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

    82% picked this

  2. One is less apt to

    Opposite

    This would maybe be okay if the answer said "more apt". Eddie was receiving a nonsensical, random series of Yes/No answers. From that, he reached a false understanding of what Marsha's dream story was (there was no story, but he thinks there was). So rather than making no sense at all out of what the partygoers were saying, Eddie reached a false understanding.

    4% picked this

  3. Dreams are often just collections

    Unsupported

    We don't really have any evidence of what dreams are like, in the sense that Marsha didn't actually tell anyone about her dream. But in the sense that Eddie made a coherent story out of the Yes/No answers, Eddie's conception of the dreams definitely DID have coherence.

    2% picked this

  4. Interpreting another person's dream requires

    Too Strong: requires

    This is the typical kind of trap answer for this sort of question, where it more or less reinforces the story but with language that is far too amped up. Eddie's interpretation of what he thought the dream was involved coherence, but we can't say from this that interpreting a dream requires that one understand it as a narrative.

    7% picked this

  5. People often invent clever and

    Doesn't Match

    Eddie came the closest to "inventing" a clever and coherent story, but he wasn't trying to explain his behavior. He was trying to reconstruct Martha's dream.

    4% picked this

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