Q8 - Traffic Accidents

[ohthatpatrick]

Question Type:
Explain the Result (which most helps to explain)

Stimulus Breakdown:
Highways with most traffic and most congestion have lowest rate of fatal accidents.

Answer Anticipation:
This is weird because it's not set up as a paradox, but we can surmise what they thought was semi-paradoxical about that.
GIVEN THAT "these highways have the MOST cars on them"
HOW CAN IT BE THAT "these same highways have the lowest rates of fatal accidents"?

Normally, we don't try to predict answers to Explain-Paradox questions, but this one's kinda irresistible to me, since I live in LA, where there is crazy traffic and congestion: how could you have a traffic fatality if the highways are so clogged that you're never going more than 15mph!!

Correct Answer:
D

Answer Choice Analysis:
(A) There's no clear common sense connection between "traffic/congestion" and more/less "distracted". Plus, it's not about quantity of accidents; it's about rates of FATAL accidents.

(B) This sort of just restates the same phenomenon in different words. Since the roads with most congestion have least fatalities, obviously the roads with most fatalities do NOT have the most congestion.

(C) Hard to connect "commuting to work" with more/less fatal accidents.

(D) Traffic/congestion have a common sense link to "high rate of speed". You can't go fast in congested traffic, thus it's unlikely you'd be in a serious accident on a heavily congested highway.

(E) This is super weak. Even though 'large trucks' could be common sense connected to 'fatal accidents', this answer literally tells us "at least one heavily traveled highway sometimes has an average or lower proportion of large trucks".

Takeaway/Pattern: Pretty straightforward! Let's remember that sometimes LSAT can be easy and not force ourselves to think we're missing something every time the answer seems clear.

#officialexplanation

[cvoldstad]

I got this one right but had it circled as I came down to B and D so thought I would write out a quick explanation of how I thought the question broke down.

The discrepancy is that highways which carry the most traffic and are thus congested tend to have the lowest rate of fatal accidents (whereas one might presume more cars, more accidents)

A) out of scope- we need something that talks about amount of cars/congestion/traffic
B) this has some of the right ingredients but it we want to know why the most congested have the lowest amount of accidents and knowing the details of those that have the highest thus is out of our scope
C) Out of scope- knowing where they are coming from doesn't matter in terms of the accident rate
D) Yes this could help us explain the phenomenon-- cars in heavy traffic have the lowest rate of fatal accidents as serious accidents (which fatal ones are) occur when vehicles are moving quickly which is an impossibility in high traffic
E) We know nothing about the relationship between large trucks and accidents


someone might have a more LSAT-ese explanation