June 1991 LSAT Section 4 Question 10

The formation of hurricanes that threaten the United States mainland is triggered by high atmospheric winds off the w...

iHAVE33FLAWSandAcommonLSATflawAINTone on April 25 at 04:00AM

I got it right, but why?

I got this right by the process of elimination, I had a "pretty good" feeling about it as well. With that, generally speaking, how can I approach flawed questions like this where diagramming isn't part of the strategy?

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Emil-Kunkin on April 28 at 09:47PM

I would say to treat it like you would a strengthen or weaken or error question. Your job is just to dissect and understand what makes the argument flawed, and to find the same error in another argument.

So here, I think the issue is that the author has jumped straight to direct causation. From evidence of correlation, they say that the first thing directly causes the second thing. This ignores the possibility of indirect causation, such as the rain leading to greater humidity, which raises temperature, which raises the odds of hurricanes, or of them both being results of the same cause.

I would them look for something that made the same mistake, subject to the same critique.

iHAVE33FLAWSandAcommonLSATflawAINTone on April 29 at 09:41PM

Thank you!