November 2019 LSAT Section 2 Question 22

Merle: Usually when I insert a dollar bill into the change machine at the office it makes a squeaking sound before it...

Shula on June 9 at 03:40AM

Many vs. most (usually)

I chose answer choice C, and the explanation says, "Incorrect. This answer has a language mismatch ("Many") and is also a valid argument." The explanation of D says "usually" matches "most." I don't understand why "usually" matches "most." I know that "many" could be "some" b/c we don't know whether "many" means more than half, and "some" can describe anything that's less than half. We know that "most" means more than half, but how do we know that "usually" is equivalent to "most?" Overall, "usually" is not "always," and we don't know that usually means more than half. Thank you so much!

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Emil-Kunkin on June 11 at 05:42PM

So I do agree with the explanation but I don't think that's the best reason to reject C, and if it came down to it I'm not sure I'd hang my hat on it.

Usually and most pretty clearly indicate greater than half. While there's a little room for doubt, if I say that "usually I do X" I think that fairly strongly indicates that we are talking about more than half of the time. It indicates that something is a matter of course, and I think in common speech one would take it to mean more than half. It would be weird to say "I usually go to the cafe on the weekend" when you only do so every third week.

However many is a bit softer. One could say that they go to the cafe many weekends, and 1/3 would not feel wrong to me. Many also can refer to absolute numbers: If 500k people support RFK for president we can reasonably say that many people support him, but this is far from most, and in reality is a small proportion of the electorate.

The better reason why C is wrong is indeed that it's valid. The initial argument had a flaw that the author believed that since something was true the majority of the time he observed it, it was true the majority of the time in general. C has no such issue.