December 1994 LSAT Section 2 Question 12

Harris: Currently, hybrid animals are not protected by international endangered–species regulations. But new techniqu...

Elizabeth25 on December 14 at 09:39PM

How to properly negate.

How do you know what part to negate. Here I negated ans. choice d as "All hybrids are the descendants of species that are not currently extent. Which did not weaken the answer. now seeing that all should have been negated to none leaving everything else the same does weaken the argument. So, going back to my question how do we know what to negate?

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Emil-Kunkin on December 20 at 04:32PM

In general, I just put "it is not the case that..." before the answer choice. No need to fret about which is the operative verb, or sub clauses. Going into the grammatical parts of a sentence is weird and unintuitive for most of us. I find it much easier to say "it isn't the case that all hybrids come from species that are still alive." This makes much more sense to me: it's just saying that there might be some hybrids whose ancestors are extinct.

One other note: if you're really stuck negating, just treat the answer choice as a must be true. If the answer must be true (taking the argument as true) then it is a necessary assumption.