October 2000 LSAT Section 1 Question 16

Retailers that excel in neither convenience nor variety of merchandise tend not to be very successful. Yet many succ...

JonJay on April 20, 2022

Quantifiers

I eliminated A right away because the quantifier in the stimulus, "many" seemed to not line up with the quantifier in the answer choice, "some". In previous questions in this parallel reasoning section, I've seen answer choices seemingly violate the quantifiers with a most-some translation, and the justification for that I've read comments on is that "most" also qualifies as "some" so they're essentially the same thing for purposes of parallel reasoning questions which, after all, are looking for "most similar" not "exact replica" answer choices. Having said that, is "many" equivalent to "most" or "some"?

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Emil-Kunkin on April 22, 2022

Hi @Jonjay,

Many is perhaps the trickiest quantifier. I personally tend to treat it as a type of a "some" as it is closer to some than to most.

"Some" conveys fairly little information. It tells us that at least one has the attribute in question, and that not all have it. In other words, anything between .01% and 99.9% could be a some.

"Most" simply means between 50 and 100 percent.

Many is slippery. Depending on context, many could mean 90%, or even less than half. Take a statement "Many people agree that Joel Embiid is the MVP." In this context, the "many" tells us nothing. Maybe thats referring to 20% of people, maybe it refers to 80%. After all, if there are 100 million basketball fans, even 5% of the population who agree would be 5 million people- which is many by all accounts. In other words- many could be treated as a some, but with the condition that it probably does not only refer to one or two instances.

Note that I would consider "a few" to be the opposite of many, which is also another imprecise term.

JonJay on April 23, 2022

This is very helpful. Thank you, Emil!