December 2004 LSAT Section 2 Question 24

Some visitors to the park engage in practices that seriously harm the animals. Surely, no one who knew that these pra...

Abigail-Lee on July 4, 2020

strategy to approach this question on the test

Would you suggest when facing these parallel reasoning questions to diagram each answer choice out? Wouldn't that take up a lot of time? Are there any other strategies you can suggest?

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shunhe on July 5, 2020

Hi @Abigail-Lee,

Thanks for the question! It’s definitely very time-consuming to diagram out every single answer choice, which is why you should try to look for reasons to not diagram answer choices before you commit to diagramming them. I’ll take this question you commented on as an example. Diagramming this, we get

Visitors <—some—> Harm animals
Knowledge —> ~Harm animals
Conclusion: Visitors <—some—> ~Knowledge

And taking the contrapositive of the second statement makes it clear why this argument works. Now we can kind of abstract the diagram of the stimulus to get

A <—some—> B
B —> ~C
Conclusion: A <—some—> ~C

And before diagramming things out in their entirety, we can eliminate answer choices that obviously don’t fit. For example, look at (D). Neither of the premises in (D) has a “some.” So we can skip over that one without diagramming it. We can also see that (C) uses the same “no X are Y,” whereas the other answer choices don’t, so we might want to diagram (C) first. Looking for obvious clues and inconsistencies can help you skip diagramming some answer choices, letting you focus on the ones that are most likely to be correct. However, between the ones that you can’t eliminate easily, you should probably diagram to double check to see if they fit the pattern or not.

Hope this helps! Feel free to ask any other questions that you might have.