Daily Drills 3 - Section 3 - Question 4

Supply the missing premise that makes the conclusion follow logically:P: X–some–YP: ?C: Z–some–Y

Blue3 January 12, 2021

Understanding “Some”

Hello, I’m new to quantifier questions. How do I read the expression “ - some - “ ?

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shunhe January 13, 2021

Hi @Blue3,

Thanks for the question! So “some X are Y” should be understood as “there is at least one X that is also a Y.” It’s a little bit different from what it means intuitively in real life. If, on the LSAT, you get a statement that says something like

“Some chairs are made of wood.”

That means that there is at least one chair made of wood. But it could just be one. We diagram “some X are Y” as

X <—some—> Y

so our example above would be

Chairs <—some—> Made of wood

And these are reversible statements. So the first one could also be written

Y <—some—> X

And our example

Made of wood <—some—> Chairs

Which can be translated into English as “some things made of wood are chairs.” Which is true, since there’s at least one wooden chair.

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

MaybeAlex March 15 at 01:00AM

Phenomenal explanation