December 2012 LSAT Section 2 Question 10

People who are allergic to cats are actually allergic to certain proteins found in the animals' skin secretions and s...

shafieiava on March 31, 2020

Answer choices A and C

Can someone explain why answer choice A is wrong and C is correct? Is A wrong because of the use of the term any? I didnt choose C because I felt like there wasnt enough said about different TYPES of cats in the stimulus. Thanks in advance.

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Skylar on April 4, 2020

@shafieiava, happy to help!

Yes, answer choice (A) is incorrect because of the word "any." (A) says that any particular person will be allergic to some cats, which is untrue because some people are not allergic to cats at all. The passage only discusses "people who are allergic to cats," which does not account for all people.

Answer choice (C) is correct because the passage makes statements that logically support it. The passage tells us that "it is common for a given cat to cause an allergic reaction in some- but not all- people who are allergic to cats" and that "people who are allergic to cats are actually allergic to certain proteins found in the animals' skin secretions and saliva." So, if all cats have identical proteins, people who are allergic to any cat would be allergic to all cats. We know this is not the case, which supports (C).

Does that make sense? Please let us know if you have any other questions!

clairejosephinedillon@gmail.com on September 24, 2022

Hello, I have a question about this explanation. Why couldn't it be that people are only allergic to specific proteins? If all cats have the same 50 proteins but allergy sufferers vary from being allergic to proteins 1-5, to 3-43, to 2-27, to 14-46... I don't see how C would make sense of this possibility. All cats could have the same proteins but not affect the same people if this were the case. I chose D because I figured it was an inference that someone suffering from 43/50 proteins would suffer more than someone only allergic to 3/50, but did not feel good about any of the answers.

Emil-Kunkin on December 18, 2022

Hi, it is indeed possible that people differ in respect to which proteins they are allergic to. However, we also know that different cats must have different proteins since we know that different cats will impact allergy sufferers differently. If the only difference was in peoples reaction to cats, rather than in the cats themselves, than each person would have he exact same response to every cat. This is not the case, so we know from the passage that there must be variance in the proteins between cats