help

[pabs523]

hello,

I have been trying to wrap my head around this question for hours and cant seem to figure it out:

All cattle ranchers dislike long winters.
All ski resort owners like long winters because long winters means increased profits.
Some lawyers are cattle ranchers.

Which of the following statements, if true, and added to those above, most supports the conclusion that no ski resort owners are lawyers.

a) some cattle ranchers are lawyers
b) some ppl who dislike lawyers are not cattle ranchers
c) all lawyers are cattle ranchers
d) all. ppl who dislike long winters are cattle ranchers
e) all ppl with increasing profits own ski resorts

i picked A but it is wrong can some one explain to me why the answer is C

[timmydoeslsat]

I will post my explanation, but please edit your post because the LSAC will take issue with the posting of copyrighted material on here without permission.

I can't recall which preptest this question is from although with the question type it does seem like an older test.

We need to keep in mind that we want to prove that SRO ---> ~L

Our evidence as of right now is:

CR ---> ~LW
SRO ---> LW

L some CR

So I will go ahead and attach our some statement into the first conditional.

L some CR ---> ~LW
SRO ---> LW
___________________
Therefore, SRO ---> ~L

As of right now we know that our evidence has shown that there are some L that are not SRO's. Notice the two necessary conditions in these two statements. We know that no CR will ever be a SRO and vice versa. We only know right now that some L are not SRO's. For us to conclude that No L's are SRO's, we need more evidence.

Notice choice C. It is telling me that every L is a CR. That means that every L is ~LW. That means that no L could ever be a SRO, as that would lead to LW, a direct contradiction.

Answer choice A is already into evidence. We already know that L some CR, which is the same thing as saying that CR some L. That is not sufficient evidence to prove that no L is a SRO like choice (C) is.