According to the passage, the LRCWA's report recommended that contingency-fee agreements
KateDavison July 9 at 03:31PM
Correlation vs Cause & Effect
Hi, I'm having trouble understanding Correlation vs Cause & Effect, and more specifically how to distinguish it in a passage. I know that it's emphasized to not mix up these two different ideas but I'm struggling to even understand them individually, let alone when they are working together in a problem. Could you offer another example explaining this? Thank you LSATMax!
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I think the best approach is to just stick with the definitions: correlation is when two or more things are associated with each other in some way. Causation is when one thing causes another. The classic example is that in the 1930s, officials noticed that polio spiked in the summer, and so did ice cream sales. This is a correlation. Two things were associated with each other. When one thing increased another increased as well. However these officials then made the classic mistake of thinking this means there was a causal link. They decided it might be the case that ice cream caused polio in some way. This is of course not true: in reality heat caused both the increase in sales and the increase in polio. Causation is extremely difficultly to prove, and we can never infer that X causes Y just because they tend to be associated with each other.
