June 2002 LSAT Section 3 Question 10

For exactly how many of the seven trucks can one determine exactly how many trucks arrived before it?

Angel92 on May 9, 2022

How can I improve on interpreting "determination" questions better?

Based on the previous post, I understand why I got this one wrong because of the way they phrased the question and it makes it very hard on my end to interpret that basically what there asking is which or how many trucks can be ultimately determined based on the rules given so far and it is Y and S for sure. Anyways would you recommend to from now on just interpreting any question that involves the word "determine" automatically answering the question how many ______ can be determined based on the rules given? because I'm seeing a pattern here and I think I'm not going to be fixated too much on the way LSAT writes there questions because they seem similar to other questions they ask on the games. There's a continuous repeat I'm seeing. I don't want to marked down because I interpreted a question incorrectly when it was obvious that it was just one of those regular determine questions. I'm sorry if this post was super long.

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Emil-Kunkin on May 15, 2022

Hi Angel92,

Determination questions are extremely tough. Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of questions that will ask about determination.

First, we have questions like this which ask us about specific things that are fully determined. That is, it might ask how many trucks are of a determined position, how many children's classrooms are determined, etc. These are essentially a must be true question, they are asking you how many of the elements/positions are guaranteed to be in a certain place.

The other type asks what additional piece of information will fully determine the order/placement of the trucks/kids/lectures/etc. For this question type, we want to find which one of the five answer choices will lead to a filled-out diagram, in which each element must be assigned to that position. You can recognize these questions as they will use phrases like "fully determined" or "completely determined."

Angel92 on May 17, 2022

Thanks Emil I'm gonna keep this response in handy in case I need to refer back to determination questions. This helps alot!