June 2014 LSAT Section 2 Question 2

Archaeologist: For 2,000 years the ancient Sumerians depended on irrigation to sustain the agriculture that fed their...

JessM on September 26 at 10:56PM

Wording Question

When going through the answer choices, I originally eliminated C because it used the word “many” - which I was told to equate to the word some. I ruled it out, but when none of the other answer choices really weakened the argument I was forced to come back and select it. Am I wrong to take the word many and equate it to some? When I used the word in that sense while going through these answer choices it just didn’t feel strong enough to me to actually weaken the argument which is why I originally ruled out C…

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Emil-Kunkin on September 29 at 04:20PM

You're totally right to treat the word many as a special flavor of the word some. However for a weakener, a some isn't a problem. We don't actually care about how strong a weakener is, as long as it weakens. Many might only mean 10 percent of farmers, but it might also mean 90 percent. Critically however the idea that we are weakening here is that modern irrigation based cultures will likely collapse too. Even if only 15 percent of farmers currently use the technique in C, surely this could be expanded. C proves that a work-around exists. It doesn't matter how many use it now, since it could likely be expanded in the future, and the argument is about a future prediction.