Q15 - The better we understand the behavior

[christine.defenbaugh]

Question Type:
Logical Completion ("Therefore, ______" = conclusion, so this is a type of Inference)

Stimulus Breakdown:
As understanding goes up, our chances of saving a species goes up. The more individuals get studied, the more we understand.

Answer Anticipation:
We're given two relative relationships in a row, and there's a common piece. The structure is: The more A, the more B. And the more Z, the more A. If we reorder these in a chain, we get: The more Z --> the more A --> the more B - or, the more individuals get studied --> the more we understand --> then the chances of saving them go up. The conclusion (inference), can't stray far from this essential concept.

*Note that these are all sliding scale relationships, not traditional conditionals - the relationship works both ways. If it's true that the more chocolate I have, the happier I am, that does also mean that the less chocolate I have, the less happy I am.


Correct answer:
C

Answer choice analysis:
(A) Strong language alert! The relationships in the stimulus may support conclusions about certain situations reducing our chance to save species, the certainty that species will definitely go extinct is unsupported.

(B) Reduction of wildlife habitat might drive down the number of individuals in the species, but that's not a definitional guarantee. Also, the extremity of "impossible" here is unsupported.

(C) This is a great correct answer hidden in a dangerous looking package. It might be tempting to say knowledge getting harder to get is out of scope, but we need to investigate what the given relationships tell us. What happens when a species gets "more endangered"? By definition, there are fewer individuals of that species alive, and so fewer to potentially study, as a general matter. That would make whatever knowledge comes from studying those individuals harder to get. And we already know that that same knowledge increases our ability to save these species. So the more endangered the species, the fewer individuals there are, the harder it becomes to gain understanding, the lower the chance of saving it.

(D) Value comparison - danger! We have relationships of the more X, the more Y. We can't support a conclusion that A is more important than B.

(E) The only reference to human study is that the more we do of a certain kind of study, the greater chance we have to save a species. There's nothing we're given about the potential harms of human study. As valid as that is to raise in a real life conversation about this, it shouldn't be in the conclusion without support in the text.

Takeaway/Pattern:
As Inference questions get harder, the LSAT will tempt us with wrong answers that seem reasonable, but have no basis in the text itself. It will often also hide the right answer in text that seems off topic at first glance. Watch out for correct answers whose core idea is supported, even if the specific language doesn't match.

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