An easy willingness to tell funny stories or jokes about oneself is the surest mark of supreme self-confidence. This ...
MasonDeesMay 25, 2022
Why Must A be True
When the stem says "willingness to tell jokes about oneself is the surest method to indicate supreme self-confidence" doesn't this mean that telling jokes about yourself is the best way to tell whether or not someone has self-confidence, not that it necessarily means someone who tells jokes about themselves is always self-confident. Why MUST A be true if "surest method" doesn't necessarily mean a 1-to-1 correlation?
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The best advice I can give you here is to remember that these questions are designed to be answered. It's common when people start studying for the LSAT that they pick apart questions unnecessarily. Fine, "surest mark" isn't strictly the exact same definition as "Everyone who...", but that is besides the point. If you diagrammed properly and read the questions critically, A should have come up as the answer.
The breakdown for this question is as follows.
Sentence 1: If you tell jokes about yourself, then you most likely are self confident.
JY--->C
Sentence 2: JY is more telling of C than JO (others).
What must be true? Well, we really only have one complete statement to go on (sentence 1) So aside from restating the formal logic, the only other conclusion we can derive is the negation of sentence 1.
notC--->notJY
Let's go look for this.
(A): if notC, then notJY (and JO). Perfect. Exactly what we wanted. At this point you should move on, but if you didn't catch A, let's do the others.
(B): If C, then notJY + notJO? We can't conclude this, no matter how we manipulate our statements.
(C): This becomes wrong as soon as it says "in order to..." Motive? We NEVER discussed WHY someone does these things, only what it says about them.
(D): What people want to do was never discussed. We have absolutely no idea what people do and don't want.
(E): Respect? Again, never discussed. Eliminate
The best thing you can take away here is to not over-analyze every question. Technically, your analysis is right. But let me give you a parallel of what you are doing.
Johnny makes a stick by glueing two smaller sticks together. One is 2ft long, the other is 3ft long. How long is the final stick?
(A): 5ft.
Student: Technically wouldn't it be longer than 5ft since the glue would have some amount of thickness?
Instructor: Yea...i guess, but you're missing the point, which is that we want to test your math ability.
