Pundit: It is good to have national leaders

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

TopicsMain Conclusion

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Stimulus

Pundit: It is good to have national leaders voted out of office after a few years. The reason is that reforms are generally undertaken early in a new government. If leaders do not act quickly to solve a problem and it becomes an issue later, then they must either deny that there they will have to admit responsibility for the persistence of the problem.

What this question is testing

Main Conclusion

Your task

Break the argument into its conclusion and evidence, then do exactly what the question stem asks with that structure.

Common trap

Answers that sound relevant to the topic but don't connect to the argument's actual reasoning.

Winning move

Predict what a right answer must do, then test each choice against the conclusion-evidence 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

Which one of the following most accurately expresses the main conclusion of

Answer choices

Never Stated5% picked this
If national leaders who fail to solve problems are voted out of office after a few years, new leaders will be
This ain't the first sentence. Furthermore, it's not even something that was said. The Main Conclusion is explicitly stated 99% of the time, so if we see an answer choice that says something that never even got said in the paragraph, we know it can't be correctly regurgitating the Main Conclusion (which did get said in the paragraph). Our conclusion is the first sentence, and this answer choice was never said by the author. They're trying to get people to pick an answer that feels like a Necessary Assumption / Inference answer.
5%
Never Stated7% picked this
National leaders who stay in power too long tend to deny responsibility for problems that they could
This ain't the first sentence. Furthermore, it's not even something that was said.
7%
Premise5% picked this
National leaders are most likely to undertake reforms early in a
This isn't the first sentence, it's one of the supporting ideas.
5%
Never Stated0% picked this
National leaders who immediately respond to problems upon taking office should be given enough time to
This ain't the first sentence. Furthermore, it's not even something that was said.
0%
Correct83% picked this
National leaders should be removed from office every few years by the voting in
Why this is right
Yay, the first sentence. It's slightly different to say "it's good to have national leaders voted out after a few years" than to say "we should remove national leaders by voting them out after a few years". But it's pretty equivalent to say "It is good to do X" and "X should be done". More importantly, this answer choice is by far the closest meaning match we get for the first sentence, which was our main conclusion.
Skill tested: Main Conclusion · how this choice captures the argument's function is the move to repeat next time.
83%

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