September 2017 LSAT Section 4 Question 23

Inventor: All highly successful entrepreneurs have as their main desire the wish to leave a mark on the world. Highly...

GLEE on November 26, 2018

Please explain the answer.

Not seeing why entrepreneurs are the only people who have ideas they want to implement. E -> ITI Not ITI -> E, which is what C seems to imply? I picked A. Thanks!

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Ravi on December 20, 2018

@GLEE,

The conditional statement you've written is missing a bi-conditional arrow.

In the stimulus, we have

Highly successful entrepreneur - >main desire to leave a mark on the world
Highly successful entrepreneur< - >(See soln. - >Implement Idea)

Interestingly enough, the final sentence of the stimulus is actually completely redundant, as it's just the contrapositive of the biconditional statement from the second sentence:

(/II - >/See soln.)< - >/Highly successful entrepreneur

In combining the first two conditional statements above, we have

(See soln. - >Implement Idea)< - >Highly successful entrepreneur - >main desire to leave a mark on the world

From this, we see that (See soln. - >Impelment Idea) - >main desire to leave a mark on the world.

Answer choice (C) matches this perfectly, as it states that the main desire of all people who implement solutions whenever they detect them is to leave a mark on the world. This is a statement that must be true if all of the inventor's statements are true.

(C) maps to (See soln. - >Implement Idea) - >main desire to leave a mark on the world.

(A) is incorrect because we have no idea about the distribution of people in this hypothetical world. What if almost everyone in is a highly successful entrepreneur? Since we don't know about the relative percentages of people who are and aren't highly successful entrepreneurs, (A) is a statement that doesn't have to be true.

Irene-Vera on June 28, 2019

Sorry, could you explain or go into detail about how the last conditional statement is the contrapositive of the second. I've tried to see it and still cannot.

ldr1026 on September 10, 2019

Could you please explain why the second condition is a bi-condition ? Is it because of the word unique?

shunhe on December 22, 2019

@ldr1026, that's right! The word unique sets up the other part of a condition - not only do highly successful entrepreneurs implement solutions whenever they see them, but they are unique in doing so, or the only ones to do so.