June 2017 LSAT Section 2 Question 6

Astronomer: This country's space agency is currently building a new space telescope that is, unfortunately, way over ...

lxnxrd19 on December 10, 2020

Negating with Unless statement

Is this the correct negation of answer choice B? if the amount of money already spent on the project is not small relative to the agency's overall budget, then a government agency should not cancel a partially completed.

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shunhe on January 7, 2021

Hi @lxnxrd19,

Thanks for the question! Negating conditionals is tricky and doesn’t happen often on the LSAT. That said, the negation of a conditional is that the sufficient condition happens, but the necessary condition doesn’t have to happen. So here, the negation of (B) would be that if more than half of the total cost of a project has already been spent, then it doesn’t have to be the case that the project should be completed.

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

Margarita on July 31, 2023

Just because the project has already gone over budget, does not mean it is more than half of the total cost of the project spent. What evidence leads us to assume this?

Margarita on July 31, 2023

Just because the project has already gone over budget, does not mean it is more than half of the total cost of the project spent. What evidence leads us to assume this?

Margarita on July 31, 2023

to assume that more than half has been spent^

Emil-Kunkin on August 1, 2023

We know this from the last sentence. We are told that the money already spent is greater than the additional cost would be. So, we know that the amount we have spent is more than half of the total actual cost.