June 2010 LSAT Section 5 Question 14

The author uses the word "immediacy" (line 39) most likely in order to express

Catherine on December 5 at 05:58PM

Example 4

Hello, For question #4 sentence 3 "By that period, however, Greek cities all had marketplaces, or agorae. When we were being taught indicators whatever the indicator came before is what it introduced. For example for sufficient indicators such as all, wherever, or each .... the word/term that followed was sufficient. Therefore whatever follows a necessary indicator would also then be the necessary condition. In the above sentence all introduces marketplaces, as it comes before it. But in the video all is used for greek cities although it precedes its own indicator. I don't understand and need some clarification on why this is. My structure I wrote out was MP -> GC / if not GC-> then no MP. Did we consider the marketplace a necessary condition automatically because it was introduced as one in the first sentence. So even if "all" is the sufficient indicator in this sentence preceding marketplace, we still consider marketplace a necessary condition?

1 Reply

Ben on December 5 at 06:24PM

Hi CMarr, thanks for the question!

I understand the confusion here. While you are correct that we need to identify which term is affected by either the necessary or sufficient condition in order to diagram, it is not always the case that the indicator comes directly before the term it affects.

As you said, "all" introduces a sufficient condition. However, we need to maintain a certain level of flexibility when considering these statements. At the end of the day, while we can be mechanical about conditional reasoning by just focussing on the indicators, it will serve us better to understand the statements being made as well.

In this case, the statement under question is "Greek cities all had marketplaces". It would seem like the sufficient condition affects marketplaces, but let's see how that would work.

Is the statement saying the following: All marketplaces had Greek cities? As we see, this doesn't make sense and is definitely not what the author is trying to convey. In fact, the sentence would be accurately converted to the following: All Greek cities had marketplaces.

They placed the "all" in a weird position within the sentence, but it is up to us to know which term it is referring to by examining the meaning of the sentence.

That is how the following conditional diagram was created.

GC - > MP
NOT MP - > NOT GC

I hope this was helpful. Please let me know if you have any other questions.