Yes, we agree with both of the previous posters. It's not a very well written question. Do you have an answer you find MORE supportable than (E)?
Remember not to demand perfection and MUST BE TRUE out of question stems that say "most strongly support".
We start from a goal of MUST BE TRUE - type proveability, but we're ultimately stuck picking the most supportable answer.
To the last poster's question, I would say it's fair to say that any time we read these ID the Disagreement questions you should read it as, "they STILL disagree". It would be too "off the page" for us to infer that one person had been convinced by the other person that a previously held opinion is wrong.
So if you understand the rules of the game are
1. They're both aware of the statements the other person said 2. They're both sticking to their statements
then it's easier to pick (E) here.
=== complete explanation ====
(A) They seem to agree that snow may melt in April and May (L only says that it will still be "quite cold")
(B) "impossible" is too extreme. The discussion here is over when research SHOULD be conducted not when it's possible.
(C) "will be wasted" is too extreme. J only says that we RISK wasting funding.
(D) no explicit discussion of temperatures, but the gist seems to be, like (A), that they would both agree about this. Jan/Feb is so cold that it ENSURES ice will not melt. April/May is still quite cold. The implied logic of that is that it will have warmed up by April/May, but maybe not so signficantly.
(E) the correct answerWe REALLY would love to see an answer saying "When should we conduct this research", because we have two explicitly different answers to that question. Instead we get (E), our best answer, which at least summarizes each person's reason for reaching this differing conclusion.
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Take a look at this question if you want to see LSAT doing a similar thing: (providing an explicit disagreement about what should be done but creating a correct answer choice that ranks the REASONS WHY each person reaches his position)
PT43, S3, Q6
http://www.manhattanlsat.com/forums/q6- ... t4763.html===