Logical ReasoningDifficulty: Easy

PT18 S4 Q4 Explanation

Until recently, anthropologists generally agreed

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

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Stimulus

Until recently, anthropologists generally agreed that higher primates originated about 30 million years ago in the Al Fayyum region of Egypt. However, a 40-million-year-old fossilized fragment of a lower jawbone discovered in Burma (now called Myanmar) in 1978 was used to support the theory However, the claim is premature, for _______ .

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
4.

Which one of the following, if true, is the most logical completion of

Answer choices

  1. Too Weak1% picked this

    there are no more primate species in Burma than there are

    This is about the quantity of primates living in the respective countries today, but we're 30-40 million years removed from the issue at hand. Also, this is just talking about primates in general, when all we care about is higher primates.

  2. Opposite4% picked this

    several anthropologists, using different dating methods, independently confirmed the estimated age of

    This helps to strengthen the credibility of the claim, since the claim is based on believing this jawbone is 40 million years old.

  3. Correct86% picked this

    higher primates cannot be identified solely by their

    Why this is right

    This basically tells us that the jawbone is not good evidence for the existence of higher primates, because higher primates didn't have a telltale jawbone. You'd need to see other stuff to know it was a higher primate, so to conclude it was a higher primate on the basis of a jawbone would be premature.

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

  4. Too Weak2% picked this

    several prominent anthropologists do not believe that higher primates could have originated in either

    This isn't addressing the evidence at hand, so it doesn't feel like a normal LSAT answer. And the fact that you have several prominent anthropologists thinking we're not looking in either of the correct two places just isn't as strong a rebuttal as (C), which is saying, "You need more than a jawbone to ID a higher primate, bro". This is just a He Said / She Said weakener -- "it's too soon to say whether you're right since there are others who disagree".

  5. Opposite7% picked this

    other archaeological expeditions in Burma have unearthed higher-primate fossilized bone fragments that are clearly older

    This would be more evidence in favor of the claim that the earliest higher primates originated in Burma.

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