Q2 - Forest fragmentation occurs when

[ohthatpatrick]

Question Type:
Inference (most strongly supported)

Stimulus Breakdown:
CAUSAL/CONDITIONAL: When development breaks up a continuous forest into separate patches, forest fragmentation (FF) occurs.
CAUSAL: white-footed mice (main carrier of Lyme disease) thrive when FF occurs.

Answer Anticipation:
Inference questions want us to integrate information, to combine multiple ideas to derive another one, typically using CONDITIONAL, CAUSAL, QUANTITATIVE, or CONTRAST language.

Here, the suggested causal chain we could get by combining the ideas says:
development cutting up continuous forest -> forest frag -> thriving white-footed mice --?--> more Lyme disease.

So we might anticipate something like "development that cuts up forests could result in more Lyme disease"

Correct Answer:
E

Answer Choice Analysis:
(A) Too strong/specific: "RARELY found" in unfragmented? (also, that is attempting to just re-state or infer off ONE claim … it's more likely that a correct answer is supported by using multiple claims)

(B) Too strong/specific: "MOST species" benefit from forest defragmentation? We can't assume that what's true for white footed mice is true for at least 51% of species.

(C) Out of scope: "the number and variety of species an area can support"?

(D) Yes! Softly worded: "can help". This is obliquely testing the idea that "development that leads to forest frag is also potentially increasing the risk of Lyme disease. We can't prove this answer, but it's "most strongly supported", where you're allowed to make the supportable (though seemingly illegally negated) inference of "If we DIDN'T have the cause, we WOULDN'T have the effect."

(E) Out of scope: "deer tick population density"

Takeaway/Pattern: Our job isn't to predict the answer with Inference, because we are ultimately at the mercy of the answer choices. But we SHOULD read proactively for conditional/causal/quantitative wording and, when we see it, figure out whether it allows us to combine claims to derive something else.

#officialexplanation

[kky215]

I got this question right when I was doing the PT under timed conditions. However, I was torn between answer choices D and E, but I correctly chose D as the right answer.

I decided not to choose E because it says "deer ticks increase". The only info that we have regarding the ticks is that they are carriers of the bacteria. And plus, it is the white footed mice (whatever they are!) that increase in number, not the deer ticks. OK I got this.

But in answer choice D, I do not like the word "beneficial". By putting effort to stop deforestation, we CAN curb the population of white footed mice, thereby curbing the possibility of bacteria transmission that causes Lyme disease. How is this "beneficial" when it is just merely stopping the potential harm from happening? It isn't necessarily "benefiting" human health -- it is merely "defending" human health from being potentially harmed by the bacteria.

Am I being too nit-picky about the wordings?
I know this is question #2 -- but I feel like the LSAT has trained me to think this way.

Can anyone clarify?
Thanks !

[tommywallach]

Hey Kky,

A couple things. First off, when you create a prompt, use the first few words of the passage itself, not the question. (I've changed this one now.)

Next thing, your reasoning for crossing off (E) isn't quite right. First off, it never says "deer ticks increase," so I'm not sure where you got that. The problem with (E) is the word "highest." We know that deer ticks live off of white-footed mice, so if there are more mice, there are likely (though not certainly) more ticks. But we don't know if ticks also live on other animals, so we can't say where the density of ticks would be highest.

Finally, you seem to be ignoring the most important word in (D): can. (D) doesn't definitively say that fragmentation does have a beneficial effect, but that it can. Given that we know the mice cause a "debilitating illness," we can infer with certainty that cutting back on the number of mice could have a beneficial effect for humans.

Hope that helps!

-t

[daijob]

I was just wondering...isn't this a illegal negation?
So,
Stimulus: If fragmentation occurs, more mice, more disease,
D: If NOT fragmentation occurs, less mice, less disease...
Is D acceptable because it says "can"?

[ShiyuF391]

I was just wondering...isn't this a illegal negation?
So,
Stimulus: If fragmentation occurs, more mice, more disease,
D: If NOT fragmentation occurs, less mice, less disease...
Is D acceptable because it says "can"?

I have the same question initially. But I guess the conditional/causal logic of "If fragmentation occurs, more mice, more disease" is not air-tight, especially for the "more mice, more disease" part. The stimulus never explicitly express this as a causal/conditional relation, merely implying this could be true by connecting different parts of the stimulus. My personal opinion is that we cannot really treat this as conditional/causal logic, just a chain of events, though some part of it is conditional/causal.

Hope this makes sense.

Thx.