October 2010 LSAT Section 1 Question 23

As it is described in the passage, the transnational approach employed by African American historians working in the ...

alicat6 on August 2, 2020

Question 2. How can you assume they only surveyed 2 books?

I am confused how B is the correct answer in question 2. How do we know people only responded with the Bible or 1984 in the survey? If we knew that 600 people chose a book that was not 1984, but then broken down the Bible had 500 votes, 1984 had 400 votes, then another book had 100 votes, how does that help in evaluating the argument? Or, the Bible could have 401 votes, 1984 has 400 votes, and 199 other books all have 1 vote each. How can we be certain that other books were not involved in the ranking? And if other books are considered, how does that help evaluate the argument?

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Skylar on August 2, 2020

@alicat6, happy to help!

We do not know the number of different books people responded with, but this does not matter. We know that 1000 readers were surveyed. If we know how many of these people did not choose 1984 (which is what (B) tells us), we can subtract that number from 1000 to get the number of people who did choose 1984. This number will allow us to evaluate if 1984 truly exercised much influence over a great number of the newspaper's readers.

In your first proposed example, 500 people responded with the Bible, 400 people responded with 1984, and 100 people responded with another book. So in this case, (B) would tell us that 600 people responded with books other than 1984, which means that (1000-600=400) 400 people responded with 1984. Your second proposed example - in which 401 people responded with the Bible, 400 responded with 1984, and 199 responded with 199 other unique books - would lead us to the same conclusion, which is that 600 people did not respond with 1984 so 400 people did. This then tells us that 400 of the 1000 newspaper readers survered named 1984 as the one book that had the most influence on their life. This is enough information to allow us to evaluate the argument, which concludes that 1984 exercised much influence on a great number of the newspaper's readers. In this case, the 400 affirmative responses would support the conclusion/the columnist's argument.

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

alicat6 on August 3, 2020

I do have a follow up question. Wouldn't 400 votes be just number until you find out how many people voted for The Bible, which came in first place? To me, 400 could only be considered a lot of votes if compared to the number of votes other books got, and we don't know what other books got based on this answer choice. How would knowing purely how many votes 1984 has help evaluate the argument? Deciding what amount of votes means a book has influence or not on readers is so arbitrary.

alicat6 on August 3, 2020

My confusion comes from believing that this answer choice is supposed to tell us the difference in amount of votes between 1st and 2nd place. But, since we do not know how many books each got a vote, we will never know how many of the other votes were for The Bible (1st place). Back to my example of 600 votes for other books and 400 votes for 1984... from that, if the Bible had 600 votes and 1984 had 400, then you could argue 1984 did not have much influence and the argument in the stimulus is wrong. But what if the Bible got 401 votes, 1984 got 400 votes, and 199 other books fell behind 1984 in rankings. This answer choice does not automatically let us know how many votes The Bible got, like the lecture shows. I think this is what is confusing me. Could this answer choice be correct because it makes us evaluate the possibility of the number of votes the Bible could get in multiple situations? And then that would help us evaluate how close of a 2nd 1984 is?

Hanfan on October 10, 2022

I had the same thoughts as alison ^^. following up on this question