Q6 - During Japan's Tokugawa period

[ohthatpatrick]

Question Type:
Weaken the Response (stick up for Patricia)

Stimulus Breakdown:
Conclusion: There WAS ninja activity at that time and people DID fear ninjas.
Evidence: Wealthy people built their floors to be squeaky so that they could hear a ninja enter the house.

Answer Anticipation:
Since we're representing Patricia, we have the mindset of "there was little ninja activity and little fear of ninjas". How would we respond to the fact that many wealthy people seemed to have built anti-ninja floors? We might just acknowledge that the rich people were afraid of ninjas. Patricia only claimed that "most Japanese" did not fear ninjas. So as long as those rich people who were scared of ninjas were 49% or less of the population, then Patricia was still correct.

Correct Answer:
C

Answer Choice Analysis:
(A) This helps Tamara, making ninja fear sound more widespread.

(B) Out of scope: we don't care how ninjas reacted to these floors. We care whether these floors were a reaction to widespread fear of ninjas.

(C) Yes! if wealthy people were a small portion of the population, then they would have been 49% of less. So Patricia's claim that MOST Japanese didn't fear ninjas could still be valid.

(D) Out of scope: we don't care about what happened after this period. We only care about how pervasive ninja activity/fear was DURING this period.

(E) Out of scope: We don't care when ninjas otherwise existed.

Takeaway/Pattern: The "most = 51% or more" distinction might seem picky, but it's LSAT. Be as specific as you can about what claim Tamara is calling not true, and inhabit Patricia's perspective to think about how you could defend the truth of your assertions.

#officialexplanation

[tianpuzhang1990]

Can someone explain this one to me? I don't get how A and B are wrong.

[karen.j.kiley]

Patricia says: There is little ninja activity and most people don't fear ninjas.
Tamara says: Most wealthy people are installing squeaky floors. You can infer that the first sentence ("That is not true") is Tamara saying there are, in fact, people who are afraid of ninjas.

So they're disagreeing over if people are really scared.

Patricia's strongest response is (C) - if wealthy people make up a very small proportion of people in general, than her original argument of "most people" not fearing ninjas is still valid.

Neither A) nor B) would be a strong counter for Patricia to make. Patricia wants: most don't fear.
A) would say people everywhere are scared and are ninja-proofing their homes.
B) would also weaken Patricia's argument by making ninjas seem even scarier

[alandman]

This is how I understand the argument:

Patricia is saying that 1) there was very little ninja activity and 2) most Japanese didn't fear them.

Tamara is alluding to the fact that the Japanese did in fact fear of the ninjas as they constructed squeaky floors.

We need to counter Tamra's argument.

A) Since Tamara's argument is that wealthy Japanese constructed squeaky floors because they feared ninjas, knowing that poor people constructed squeaky floors only weakens Patricia's claim that there was very little ninja activity.

C) If the wealthy made up a small population, then that strengthens Patricia's argument that "most Japanese did not fear ninjas".

[coco.wu1993]

Is B wrong because it attacks the premise of Tamara's conclusion?

[sumukh09]

Is B wrong because it attacks the premise of Tamara's conclusion?

B is wrong because it doesn't attack Tamara's conclusion. Tamara's conclusion is that it isn't true that most Japanese didn't fear ninja's. And the support she uses to make this conclusion is that the wealthy had designed squeaky floors to signal when a ninja was in the house.

But does her support help validate her conclusion? Not necessarily because we don't know how well wealthy Japanese represented Japanese people overall. If Patricia responded to Tamara with what answer choice B said, then Tamara would just say, "Oh, really? I didn't know that. But that does nothing to address my main point that most Japanese people did in fact fear ninjas, because if they didn't, then the wealthy wouldn't have squeaky floors at all, regardless of their effectiveness."

[ttunden]

I had a similar approach

So basically we need to find something weakens Tamara's counter to Patricia's argument.

Tamara says that wealthy japanese build their houses with squeaky floors so that they get a warning when ninjas enter.

During the test I didn't have much of a prephase with this. But I made sure to understand the core and then hit the answer choices
A This would probably help Tamara not weaken. Adds more to her argument
B No because Tamara rules this out. She says the wealthy INTENTIONALLY constructed their houses with squeaky floors. So it doesn't matter if they do not make a sound, the wealthy were still cognizant and wanted to be warned if ninjas were in the house.
C This is the best of the bunch because this shows that the wealthy were a minority during the tokugawa period, so Patricia's argument still holds that most japanese did not fear ninjas
D Irrelevant. eliminate
E Irrelevant eliminate

[GlenH807]

To me (B) seems to strengthen Tamara's argument. Sounded like the ninjas implemented a secret training as a response to squeaky floors, built out of fear of ninjas; which then proves that the people's fear, although not necessarily widespread (most), do exist.

[ohthatpatrick]

Tamara is arguing that "most Japanese people DID fear ninjas".

You're saying that (B) helps convince you of that?
If we know that ninjas learned how to walk silently on squeaky floors, that's evidence that most Japanese people feared ninjas?

To me, the fact that people made squeaky floors is evidence that they were afraid of ninjas. (But we already knew this from Tamara's evidence. Choice B doesn't get any credit for revealing to us that people made squeaky floors out of ninja fear).

(B) only addresses whether or not ninjas figured out a way around the squeaky floors.

Whether the ninjas practiced a squeaky floor technique or not doesn't add anything to our investigation of whether ninja fear was widespread.

At any rate, I'm assuming you also know that strengthening Tamara is the opposite of what we're trying to do. We want to counter Tamara. So if you thought (B) was helping Tamara, you'd definitely want to eliminate it.

[GlenH807]

Right, I eliminated B because it seems to reassert Tamara's point instead of countering it. B seems to confirm that the fear of ninjas do exist

[ChrisZ712]

I chose B for a different reason. If ninjas could walk silently on squeaky floors, then the floors wouldn't be useful for the purposes of alerting the people in the house. They could still have those floors for other reasons, but it probably wouldn't be because they want to be alerted of ninjas. The wealthy may have intentionally got those floors for decorative purposes. This would weaken Tamara's argument by showing that the reason she attributes to fear of ninjas in fact was not related to a fear of ninjas at all. This would further strengthen Patricia's point. (There's an assumption; I'll get there.)

Now for C, I don't agree with the answer because it really can't justify that the wealthy are unrepresentative. In what way? The fact that they have squeaky floors? OK, let's assume they do have these floors because they are scared of ninjas. The poor may be scared, too, but they can't afford the floors (they're poor....). So that doesn't really make the squeaky wealthy unrepresentative.

Now, the assumption I make in B is that the wealthy knew of the ninjas ability to avoid making a noise. Sure, not a good assumption. However, the assumption for C, as I see it, is that the poor and wealthy both had the same opportunity to rig some alert system but the majority (poor) chose not too. This is a worse assumption because a pretty defining characteristic of wealthy vs poor is that the wealthy get things the poor do not.

Can someone please explain the error in my logic? Thanks!