November 2018 LSAT Section 1 Question 12

A study found that most of the strokes diagnosed by doctors occurred in the left side of patients' brains. This sugge...

@MichaelaJ on February 6, 2024

Still need additional clarification

Hello- I am still not quite understanding why B is correct and D is incorrect. If we are looking for premises to support the conclusion that right-sided strokes are more likely to go undiagnosed, why would D be incorrect? I would think that if the symptoms are different that would explain why they are more likely to go undiagnosed. Thank you!

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Emil-Kunkin on February 6, 2024

The argument starts by saying that one thing is diagnosed more often than the other. The author then uses this to support the claim that the other thing is under diagnosed. We are then asked to bring in a final sentence to support the conclusion that they are under diagnosed.

This is actually a sufficient assumption question.
I would start out by looking at the claim that because one thing is more commonly diagnosed than another thing that the other thing must be under diagnosed. There seems to be a major flaw with this: maybe the more commonly diagnosed thing is simply more common. If we see many more instances of common cold than of Ebola I would not think that Ebola is under diagnosed, I would just think it is rarer than the cold.

B fixes this flaw. It tells us that the two things actually are equally common.

D just doesn't give us enough info. Different doesn't really mean harder and could actually mean easier. If this were a pure strengthen question D would look slightly more attractive, but we need to fix the flaw here. I still don't think D strengthens because it would force us to assume that the difference makes it harder to diagnose, which is not what the answer choice says.

@MichaelaJ on February 7, 2024

This makes more sense, thank you!