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 ...

Jenna-Clayborn on January 13, 2021

#2 Further Explanation on Answer Choice C

Answer choice C seems just as, if not more justifiable than Answer B for the second example. Even if you can calculate the number of readers that voted for 1984, if that sample group is only a small portion of the actual reader base, I don't think you can soundly make the argument that "a great number" of readers were influenced by that book. As someone in another thread stated, it seems like you need both B and C to actually make this argument with any certainty (their explanation of this same issue is much more graceful than mine, so please take a look at it if I've been confusing here). Can someone explain in very exact terms why the 1000 readers sampled are the only ones relevant?

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shunhe on January 14, 2021

Hi @Jenna-Clayborn,

Thanks for the question! Keep in mind that this is an “evaluate” type question. And remember to take a careful look at what the conclusion/argument is about. We don’t care about the actual reader base. We just care about the readers of the newspaper; the conclusion is about “many of this newspaper’s readers.” It’s not about the reader base of the books themselves. And so we shouldn’t assume for no reason that a sample of 1000 is too small to get a sense of the readership’s opinions without anything else that suggests otherwise. 1000 person size samples are actually quite large for a study of this type.

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

alanylhuang on April 25, 2021

But if we think about it the way he explained to an extreme, there could be 1 person who is the reader of the column or none, then the survey would be entirely irrelevant. That answer would also help to evaluate the argument though.