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 ...

slbetz on September 30, 2020

#2: C seems just as correct as B, seeking further explanation

Answer choice B only applies on one end of the extreme. If only 1 person voted 1984, then it didn't influence a "great number" of readers. However, if the other extreme is applied and 499 people voted 1984, that is not enough to conclude that a "great number of this newspaper's readers" were influenced by it without the information in answer choice C ("how many people read the columnist's newspaper"). "Great number" seems quite relative. Only 1,000 people are surveyed. Going along with applying extremes, if 499 people out of 1 million total readers voted 1984, 499 isn't a "great number" relatively, so we wouldn't be able to evaluate the accuracy of the argument's "great number" claim without knowledge of total number of readers. The explanation given in the video for why C is incorrect is that it is simply irrelevant because only the 1,000 people mentioned are the ones we should think about. C seems to expose a possible sampling error since the value at question is a "number," which doesn't seem to be generalized through a survey sample like a proportion/percent would be, especially if it is to be considered representative of the entire population of magazine readers. B cannot tell us if votes for 1984 constituted a "great number of this newspaper's readers," it can only tell us if it does NOT. C has the exact same conclusion: It cannot tell us if votes for 1984 constituted a "great number of this newspaper's readers," but it also can tell us only if it does NOT. Without delving into what "great number" means, how is B more valuable than C in evaluating this argument? Knowing the exact number of people who voted for 1984 out of 1,000 still doesn't help us evaluate whether 20 people or 300 people should be considered a "great number" of readers. At least C would tell us with more confidence whether the conclusion is based on a representative sample.

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on April 9, 2021

I had the same thought process and conclusion! #help

KiaBrodersen on December 6, 2023

I am still confused on this one as well. I don't quite understand the explanations of the other instructors' replies. I thought C was correct for Example 2 because knowing how many people read the newspaper would influence whether "a great number of readers were influenced by 1984". If only 1,000 people (the same number that was surveyed) read the newspaper, and from a survey of those 1,000 people, they concluded that 1984 has a great influence on their readers. I understand that in the aforementioned sample, that to conclude the amount of influence that 1984 had on those readers, the amount who did not choose 1984 would be necessary in evaluating the argument. But what if there was 10,000 readers of the newspaper? How could you conclude that a great number of the newspaper's readers were influenced by 1984 if you only surveyed 1,000? Wouldn't the number of people who read the newspaper also influence how strong or weak the argument is? I haven't had an instructor reply to me for awhile, so a response would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

KiaBrodersen on December 6, 2023

Also, sorry I noticed that I had been replied to for some of my questions. I did notice that no one had replied to this question though posed by other students though.

Emil-Kunkin on December 9, 2023

It's important to pay attention to what the argument actually is. The conclusion here is quite narrow: that the readers of the magazine were influenced by the book. The sample of 1000 is certainly large enough to suffice (although we do not know about its representativeness). A sample of 1k is large enough for almost everything in fact, as long as the sample os representative. Most of the surveys you see in the news only sample a few thousand people, and yet purport (usually quite accurately) to reflect the opinion of a state or the whole country. This is the core of what a survey is, one asks a subset of people to understand the views of a larger population. Since the sample size is large enough for statistical significance (generally you need to be bigger than a hundred ideally), the size of the sample is irrelevant regardless of whether the newspaper has 1500, 15,000, or 1.5 million readers.