Logical ReasoningDifficulty: Hard

PT9 S2 Q23 Explanation

A poor farmer was fond

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

TopicsSufficient Assumption

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Stimulus

A poor farmer was fond of telling his children: “In this world, you are either rich or poor, and you are either honest or dishonest. All all rich farmers are dishonest.”

What this question is testing

Sufficient Assumption

Your task

Find the assumption that, if added, guarantees the conclusion follows.

Common trap

Answers that only partly bridge the gap, leaving the conclusion unproven.

Winning move

Identify the new term in the conclusion and pick the choice that links it to the evidence.

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

The question
23.

The farmer’s conclusion is properly drawn if the argument

Answer choices

  1. Correct61% picked this

    every honest farmer is

    Why this is right

    If every honest farmer is poor, that means are rich farmers can't be honest. That aligns with our prediction, but in a really mean way. The writers definitely ran the answer through the complicator, and they also relied on a common-sense assumption that you can't be both poor and rich. Now, if you're thinking "wait, didn't they tell us that you're either one or the other? Doesn't that mean you can't be both?" be careful. On the LSAT, "or" and even "either / or" isn't typically exclusionary. That's complicator-logic-speak for "or" doesn't exclude the possibility of "both." But in this case, since common sense tells us that rich and poor are opposites, we're allowed to go from "every honest farmer is poor" to "rich farmers are not honest."

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

  2. Opposite (if anything)3% picked this

    every honest person is a

    We need to establish that these richy rich farmers are not honest. Establishing that every honest person is a farmer is going in the opposite direction. If this said "every honest person is not a farmer" it would be a correct answer.

  3. Reversal: conclusion flip13% picked this

    everyone who is dishonest is a

    The conclusion is that all rich farmers are dishonest. This reverses that conclusion and tells us that all dishonest folks are rich farmers.

  4. Negation (if anything)23% picked this

    everyone who is poor is

    We're trying to establish that our rich farmers are not honest. If we're going to use the concept of being poor to do that, you need to rely on the common-sense assumption that if you're rich, you're not poor. If we assume that, we know our rich farmers aren't poor. Does this answer tell us that if you're not poor, you're not honest? Nope. It's the negation of a viable answer.

  5. No Impact2% picked this

    every poor person is a

    If every poor person is a farmer, what impact does that have on our conclusion about rich farmers? None.

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