October 1991 LSAT Section 2 Question 15

A well–known sports figure found that combining publicity tours with playing tours led to problems, so she stopped co...

Mazen on June 16, 2022

Answer-choice B: Biconditional?

Hi, Is the first sentence in B a biconditional? The first sentence is: "The only times that the hospital's emergency room staff attends to relatively less serious emergencies are times when there is no critical emergency to attend to." Thank you Mazen

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jakennedy on June 18, 2022

Hi @Mazen,

Not quite. A biconditional needs to work both ways. In this case, we would need to be able to say:

No critical emergency ? emergency room staff attends to less serious emergencies

I imagine this is true in the real world. If the staff isn’t attending to serious emergencies, I’m sure they attend to less serious emergencies. They are the emergency staff after all.

However, the answer choice does not tell us that. The answer choice diagrams the other way:

emergency room staff attends to less serious emergencies ? no critical emergency

Since it never explicitly tells us that the relationship can be reversed, we cannot diagram it as a biconditional.

Mazen on June 21, 2022

Thank You Jacob!

Mazen