October 2008 LSAT Section 4 Question 11

If Sukanya receives six e–mail messages, the fifth of which is from Lula, which one of the following must be true?

Harper on July 7, 2020

Confused

First, I would like to note that in another comment on this question, Mehran says there will be a video for this game soon. 7 years later and still no video. But my question is. Isn’t it possible to have: H 1,7 J 2,3 L 4,5 And yet this is a must be true question, can you please explain this apparent contradiction, maybe I am overlooking something. Thank you in advance

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shunhe on July 8, 2020

Hi @Harper,

Thanks for the question! So actually, HJJLLH isn’t a possible combination. How do we know that? Well, it violates the last rule, that of the first three message, EXACTLY one is from J. And HJJLLH has 2 messages from J in the first three messages, which contradicts this last rule.

So putting L in fifth, what can we put in 1 and 6? Obviously not L, though H does work (as you seemed to figure out). J doesn’t work because we need to have one HJ block. So H has to be first and sixth.

Then we also know that J has to be 2nd. Because of the exactly one J in the first three rule, the other J has to go in 4, and the second L has to go in three. So when L is in fifth out of six messages, there’s only one possible scenario: HJLJLH. And then we can easily see that the answer is (D).

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Harper on July 16, 2020

Thank you this actually helped me out a lot. When I wrote down my rules I put that J has to appear in first 3 but forgot the part that it appears only once. Thanks again!