June 1993 LSAT Section 1 Question 13

Five years ago, during the first North American outbreak of the cattle disease CXC, the death rate from the disease w...

Vic04324 on October 2, 2023

Answer anticipation

Hi, I got the answer correct and understand why, however, I found I didn't really have solid anticipation for the right answer before hitting the answer choices. Rather, I just noted a temporal aspect could be used to explain the difference. I was wondering if there was possibly a better anticipation for this question that may have helped me get the correct answer faster, as many of the answer choices in this question dealt with temporal elements.

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Emil-Kunkin on October 4, 2023

I do like the idea of looking for multiple ways that a conclusion could be wrong, and this is double true for question that involve some kind of study or stats. While i agree that there is a time element, we need to ask ourselves what the author is doing, and at the core, the author is making an argument about causality. That it, they're saying that the increase in reported mortality was caused by the disease becoming more lethal.

Whenever we see an argument about causation we should try to think of alternative causes. Maybe the disease was over-reported or underreported at one point, maybe the disease didn't get more lethal, but a drought weakened the cows immune systems, or maybe farmers just decided they felt like some good old fashioned insurance fraud.

Vic04324 on October 5, 2023

Thank you Emil!