June 2010 LSAT Section 5 Question 14

The author uses the word "immediacy" (line 39) most likely in order to express

AEB on April 12 at 12:17AM

Unless rule

Hi! In the video, Mehran covers the “unless” rule. Requesting clarification for the example he used: "A person cannot win a lottery ticket, unless they buy a ticket.” The rule outlined in the video states that the statement prior to the word “unless" would be the sufficient condition, and it should be negated. So, assuming that the word, “cannot” in the example sentence is the negation of the word, “win,” wondering why the visual demonstration of this rule wouldn’t read as follows, what am I missing?: -WL > BT = -BT > WL (contra) — the contrapositive doesn’t make sense to me, "a person doesn’t buy a ticket, unless they can win the lottery???” Most understand that the chances of winning a lottery are slim. In fact most purchase a lottery ticket never actually expecting to win. Perhaps this is not the point of the example, and I should just stick to the given facts. However, the contrapositive statement just seems non-sensical to me. If I’m seeing this wrongly, please help. Many thanks.

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Emil-Kunkin on April 16 at 08:39PM

I like to just replace the word unless with the phrase if not (or however would be grammatically correct in that case).

So here, we would replace the unless with: you cannot win the lottery if you do not buy a ticket.

This seems way easier to me, and we would diagram it as

If Not Ticket then Not win
If win then ticket

This really reduces the room for error and the number of steps we need to take.