Q23 - The higher the altitude

[civnetn]

I like all this discussion of answer choice A.

Here's where I think the discrepancy lies:

I'm going to have trouble explaining this in the correct language, but bear with me.

In the example, height and altitude are very tightly constrained. The higher you travel the thinner the air. Period. So you know that whenever you are higher, you have thinner air.

With A) however, we have no way of knowing how initially wise Henrietta or her daughter are. All we know is that as you become older, you become wiser. Thus, perhaps Henrietta's daughter is incredibly wise for her age, much wiser in fact than her mother.

You'll also notice the language differs. The stimulus uses (I want to say prescriptive?) language. Present tense and factual. This is mirrored in D) Whereas A) uses "becoming" language. As you get older, you get wiser. This doesn't mean you can't already be incredibly wise at a young age.

[BensonC202]

The original argument sets up a general rule -- the higher you go, the thinner the air. Then it goes on to compare two places with different altitudes and conclude the the higher place has thinner air. Simple enough. If we want to complicate it, we can write it as this:

If A has more X than B, then A has more Y than B as well.

(D) has the same structure. If something is ______er (in this case, "older"), it has more _______ (in this case rings, in the original argument, thin air). Then (D) goes on to apply this rule in comparing two trees.

(A) is extremely tempting -- tricky of the LSAT to place it first! It sets up a comparison: as one gets ______er, one gets ______er. However, what is important to notice here is that this is a comparison between someone at one age and that same person at another age. What we cannot do -- and this is exactly what (A) does do! -- is use this to compare two people. Let's say we're comparing me to King Solomon (who, we'll agree for the sake of discussion, was a very wise guy). Well, I'm good at the LSAT, but I'm not King Solomon, so even when I hit 70, I probably won't be wiser than King Sol was at 37.

Let me challenge you: what should (A) end with in order for it to work as a parallel argument?

(B) is promising, except is has two conditions used in the comparison, and then it goes on to only use one of them.
(C) shows a similar error to (A). It sets up a comparison between groups but goes on to misapply it to one person in two periods of his life.
(E) is reversed. For it to be correct, it should end by saying "English has a larger vocabulary, therefore it is harder to learn than Italian."

If A be changed into - As one gets older, one gets wiser, since H is older than himself 10 years ago, H must be wiser than H 10 years ago. Would that be working as a parallel argument ?

[AdenB248]

Seems like people are saying (A) is wrong because the daughter can still be wiser than Henrietta. If that's true, I absolutely have no idea why (D) does not fall under that same issue. Don't say the wording because there is nothing about the wording that makes it that the second tree for sure does not have more rings than the first tree. "The older a tree, the more rings is has" is litterally another way of saying "As a tree gets older, it gets more rings." No difference.

Someone please help. Plllzzzzz