The Amazon River flows eastward into the Atlantic Ocean from its source in the western part of South America. The la...

LSAT2023 on January 10, 2022

Can the people working here respond, I will be writing a review about this, this is very unprofessional, the service here is shit.

jakennedy on January 13, 2022

Sure thing!

A. This answer choice is too weak to do anything. It is telling us that some freshwater and saltwater fish that share characteristics do not share common ancestors, but the stimulus tells us that “certain freshwater fish that inhabit the Amazon are descended from now-extinct saltwater fish…”. Stating that there are other cases in which this does not occur isn’t helpful when we have already established that it does, in fact, occur.

C. Again, this answer choice is too weak. “Many” on the LSAT means “some”, so this could very well be just a few species of fish out of thousands. It would require an assumption to say that it is a significant proportion. The bigger problem is that this answer choice does not address the Amazon River. Don’t lose sight of the conclusion:

“the Amazon River once flowed into the Pacific Ocean”

With answer choice C, perhaps those fish inhabit both oceans because they traveled through the Amazon River, but perhaps not. Thus, it is again requiring an assumption in order to strengthen that very well may not be true.

D. This is irrelevant. The stimulus already told us that the Amazon has been cut off by the Andes Mountains, so we don’t care how much they extend beyond that.

E. In the stimulus, the freshwater fish were descended from now-extinct saltwater fish. It never says that they could live in both fresh and saltwater at any given period. Perhaps their ancestors would have died in freshwater, and perhaps those freshwater fish would die in saltwater.