Q6

[jklein1233]

I'm having trouble eliminating a few answer choices here. The question asks to identify which of the following claims that the author made in the passage. After completing this under timed conditions and reviewing, I'm still unable to eliminate answer choices A and C. This is an identity question and I think I was able to find both of these answer choices in the passage:

(A) Injunctions against the disclosure of trade secrets limit an employee's chances of being hired by a competitor- "It has been argued that because such measures help generate suspicions and psychological barriers to full and free utilization of abilities in the employee's new situation, they are hardly effective in upholding the individual's rights to free employment decisions." line 13-18

(C) Employees who switch jobs to work for a competitor usually unintentionally violate the law by doing so- "But they are far more likely to manifest themselves subconsciously or inconspicuously- for example in one's daily decisions at the new post, or in the many small contributions one might make to a large team effort- often in the form of an intuitive sense of what to do or to avoid. Theoretically, an injunction also prohibits such inadvertent leakage." line 36-42

Am I missing something here or are these claims made by the author in the passage?

Thanks for the help.

[ManhattanPrepLSAT1]

A couple quick points here.

Let's look at answer choice (A). It says that the injunctions limit an employee's chance of being hired. The passage however states that such measures help generate barriers to full and free utilization of abilities in the employee's new station. There's a difference since the latter is about how the new employee fits in to the new company as opposed to whether the employee gets hired by the new company.

For answer choice (C). I think we're looking in the wrong place. We should be down in lines 46-50, where the passage states that there is the further problem of distinguishing trade secrets from what may be legitimately asserted as technological skills developed independently by the employee. This is a clear point made by the author and so is the correct answer.

This was an incorrect post. I've left it so people don't get confused by the conversation that follows. The correct answer is actually (E)!

[john]

Here's my take on things.

6. (E)
Question Type: Identification (47-51)
This question requires identifying which claim is made by the author. Since the question stem gives us little to go on, a process of elimination is the best approach. This will lead us to (E); the third paragraph tells us that the improper use of trade secrets, or intellectual theft, can be hard to distinguish from independent innovation.

(A) is not supported by the passage, which does not indicate that injunctions limit employees’ mobility.
(B) is not supported by the passage; while it indicates that existing measures such as injunctions are ineffective, that doesn’t mean that some kind of measure is unnecessary.
(C) is not supported by the passage; there’s no indication that employees usually violate the law, either intentionally or unintentionally.
(D) is not supported by the passage, which does not discuss the issue of protecting information from new employees, nor suggest that employers have unlimited freedom.

[kejia.tang]

Hi,

jklein, I had also chosen (C) due to the lines you listed. The fact that the leakage mentioned in line 42 is prohibited by the injunction (at least theoretically) seems to suggest that employees "are far more likely" to "subconsciously and inconspicuously" break the law, once they move to a new employer.

However, upon second look, (C) has several problems. First, "Far more" refers to trade secrets, not employees. Even if it did apply to employees, (C) uses the word "usually", implying that most employees unintentionally violate the law, while "far more" implies "some" but not "most". Also, what (C) actually says is that employees violate the law by switching jobs, implying a causal "switch jobs" -> "break law". The passage supports possible lawbreaking after the switch had already happened, which is very different from what (C) says.

[shirando21]

A couple quick points here.

Let's look at answer choice (A). It says that the injunctions limit an employee's chance of being hired. The passage however states that such measures help generate barriers to full and free utilization of abilities in the employee's new station. There's a difference since the latter is about how the new employee fits in to the new company as opposed to whether the employee gets hired by the new company.

For answer choice (C). I think we're looking in the wrong place. We should be down in lines 46-50, where the passage states that there is the further problem of distinguishing trade secrets from what may be legitimately asserted as technological skills developed independently by the employee. This is a clear point made by the author and so is the correct answer.

Does that help clear this one up?

Is E supported in any place in the passage? Could pls provide a line reference?

[soyeonjeon]

A couple quick points here.

Let's look at answer choice (A). It says that the injunctions limit an employee's chance of being hired. The passage however states that such measures help generate barriers to full and free utilization of abilities in the employee's new station. There's a difference since the latter is about how the new employee fits in to the new company as opposed to whether the employee gets hired by the new company.

For answer choice (C). I think we're looking in the wrong place. We should be down in lines 46-50, where the passage states that there is the further problem of distinguishing trade secrets from what may be legitimately asserted as technological skills developed independently by the employee. This is a clear point made by the author and so is the correct answer.

Does that help clear this one up?

But line 18 says that "they would hardly be effective in upholding the individual's rights to free employment decisions."
Doesn't that imply that they may limit the employee's chances of being hired?

Thanks.

[Djjustin818]

I'm confused...

The answer key says the answer is E but Matt said it's C.. which one is it?

[tommywallach]

Hey DJ,

It's (E). And the identification/explanation was done very nicely by John.

-t

[timsportschuetz]

(C) is also extremely suspect due to its' scope. It is stated in extremely general terms. "Violate the law"... Do you we know exactly what law we are talking about? The passage is more restrictive regarding this topic. Also, looking into the answer choice a bit further, "violate the law by doing so", should raise another red flag! the "so" in the answer choice refers to the actual "switching of the job". The passage is not concerned with the actual switching of jobs, but rather with the employee's secret trade knowledge being disclosed. A correct answer choice must be provable! So, can we be sure that (C) refers to the switching process of getting a new job, the jaywalking across the street due to the new location of the new job, or the disclosure of trade secrets? We cannot...

However, I believe that the above poster has the reason for eliminating (C) exactly right! "Usually" is much too strong here... If (C) instead utilized "sometimes", it would be much more attractive...

[einuoa]

A couple quick points here.

Let's look at answer choice (A). It says that the injunctions limit an employee's chance of being hired. The passage however states that such measures help generate barriers to full and free utilization of abilities in the employee's new station. There's a difference since the latter is about how the new employee fits in to the new company as opposed to whether the employee gets hired by the new company.

For answer choice (C). I think we're looking in the wrong place. We should be down in lines 46-50, where the passage states that there is the further problem of distinguishing trade secrets from what may be legitimately asserted as technological skills developed independently by the employee. This is a clear point made by the author and so is the correct answer.

Does that help clear this one up?

But line 18 says that "they would hardly be effective in upholding the individual's rights to free employment decisions."
Doesn't that imply that they may limit the employee's chances of being hired?

Thanks.

That line reads that they would hardly be effective in upholding individual's rights to free employment decisions because they generate psychological barriers in the employee's NEW SITUATION. The injunction affects the individual when they are already hired in the new company because the individual wouldn't know whether to use his/her skills adequately or not, in fear of divulging trade secrets. But this doesn't say that it would limit the employee's chance of actually being hired, just it would limit the individual's work once hired.

[bex]

Is E supported in any place in the passage? Could pls provide a line reference?

Line 50 is where the author makes the claim (albeit slightly reworded) that is found in (E).

[coco.wu1993]

I still think A is supported by line 18: "they would hardly be effective in upholding the individual's rights to free employment decisions". Could anyone please further explain this?

[ohthatpatrick]

Yeah I don't love the previous mention of "nothing in the passage suggests that injunctions limit an employees' mobility"

I think your line reference in 18 suggests that someone may be less likely to take a certain job out of wariness about how the injunction will generate suspicions / constraints in her new workplace.

That's the sense in which injunctions seem to impinge on "free employment decisions".

However, (A) is talking about "likelihood of being hired".

Nothing in the passage gives us the impression that the new employer is less likely to hire this worker.

We're more given the impression that this worker might shy away from trying to get a job at a competing business, where the injunction would apply.

The stuff being discussed in line 18 pertains to the worker ALREADY WORKING AT HER NEW JOB ("in her new situation"). So it doesn't seem to impact the likelihood of being hired. Instead it's suggesting that the experience of working for a competitor might be stressful, stressful enough to keep the worker from seeking employment there in the first place or stressful enough to make the worker want to quit that job once she observes how crappy her new situation is.

If we wanted to make a weird mathematical argument, we could say that "never applying" = "reduces your chances of being hired", but I think that's some illegal wordplay.

(A) is suggesting that the employer is aware of the injunction when considering hiring the worker and that the employer is less likely to hire the worker because of that.

(If anything, there's probably more common sense on the side of a competitor being MORE likely to hire this type of worker ... the employer would probably be hoping that some of the trade secrets subconsciously leak out).

Hope this helps.

[sun_of_nothing]

This is my first post on this forum after studying for the LSAT for quite a while now, and this question almost compels me to post to explain some of my thinking on this question.

First, the language of questions stem states, the author "makes" which one of the following claims. This leads me to think that this is an identification question when in fact, the two most tempting answers: (c) and (e) are both implied rather than stated, but I suppose there's nothing we can do to challenge these phrasing issues.

Concerning the answers, I think it's the following is obvious.
(a) no support
(b) no support, at best, one could misinterpret the degree of the central argument as making claims about the necessity of injunctions rather than their usefulness.
(d) no support for anything resembling new employers being able to break out the thumb screws on new employees

The real candidates seem to be (c) and (e). If we assume someone has a good working knowledge of the passage, they would've been left with these, and working wrong to right, would've started trying to eliminate (c) first but would have found a difficult time doing it.

Here's analysis on (c): First, it's implied through the combination of lines 41-42 where the passage states that theoretically, even unintentional leaks are forbidden by injunctions and 35-41, where it is stated that employers often leak knowledge without consciously doing so. Assuming injunctions are part of the law, yeah, it IS implied that SOME employees usually break the law by moving to a new positions. HOWEVER, (e) has the same problem of merely being implied, so close but no cigar.

Where (c) goes wrong for me is that it states simply that EMPLOYEES blah blah blah... There's an implied (ALL) employees usually break the law. This includes the custodial staff and interns who bring coffee to people and makes the scope of the statement way wider than what's inferrable from the text.

It's a tricky area of English because someones when we just make declarative statements about nouns without an article, we imply SOME while other times, we imply ALL. For instance, "I don't doubt that rabbits are white" would be interpreted as "I don't doubt that SOME rabbits are black" whereas a statement like "rabbits are animals" would typically be interpreted as "ALL rabbits are black."

As far as I know, this is not a well-illuminated area of the LSAT because I recall see examples of both the above based on the context of certain passages and arguments. Maybe someone can chime in on this matter. Either way, hopefully someone is helped by this explanation.

[massuda18]

This is my first post on this forum after studying for the LSAT for quite a while now, and this question almost compels me to post to explain some of my thinking on this question.

First, the language of questions stem states, the author "makes" which one of the following claims. This leads me to think that this is an identification question when in fact, the two most tempting answers: (c) and (e) are both implied rather than stated, but I suppose there's nothing we can do to challenge these phrasing issues.

Concerning the answers, I think it's the following is obvious.
(a) no support
(b) no support, at best, one could misinterpret the degree of the central argument as making claims about the necessity of injunctions rather than their usefulness.
(d) no support for anything resembling new employers being able to break out the thumb screws on new employees

The real candidates seem to be (c) and (e). If we assume someone has a good working knowledge of the passage, they would've been left with these, and working wrong to right, would've started trying to eliminate (c) first but would have found a difficult time doing it.

Here's analysis on (c): First, it's implied through the combination of lines 41-42 where the passage states that theoretically, even unintentional leaks are forbidden by injunctions and 35-41, where it is stated that employers often leak knowledge without consciously doing so. Assuming injunctions are part of the law, yeah, it IS implied that SOME employees usually break the law by moving to a new positions. HOWEVER, (e) has the same problem of merely being implied, so close but no cigar.

Where (c) goes wrong for me is that it states simply that EMPLOYEES blah blah blah... There's an implied (ALL) employees usually break the law. This includes the custodial staff and interns who bring coffee to people and makes the scope of the statement way wider than what's inferrable from the text.

It's a tricky area of English because someones when we just make declarative statements about nouns without an article, we imply SOME while other times, we imply ALL. For instance, "I don't doubt that rabbits are white" would be interpreted as "I don't doubt that SOME rabbits are black" whereas a statement like "rabbits are animals" would typically be interpreted as "ALL rabbits are black."

As far as I know, this is not a well-illuminated area of the LSAT because I recall see examples of both the above based on the context of certain passages and arguments. Maybe someone can chime in on this matter. Either way, hopefully someone is helped by this explanation.

This is what (c) hinges on. (c) is far too general (ie. who is to say that those employees who switch jobs have trade secrets to give. And those who don't you can not say they are breaking the law)

The take away here is that you need to looking out for statements that are too strong, statements that are overstating what is actually happening the prompt.

[xjiang.xj]

I eliminated E because I didn't think that there was any mention of "independent innovation". I still cannot convince myself that independent development of technological skills refer to independent innovations.

Can anyone help me with this? Thanks.

[ohthatpatrick]

Independently developing [anything new] = independent innovation.

Innovation = developing something new

Are you thrown off by "skills", when you're used to thinking of innovation involving inventing actual tangible things?

Or are you just saying there's no textual support for "new"?

There really isn't quite any explicit support for "new", but since we're talking about trade 'secrets', it's within the province of common sense to think that a company would be guarding something they THINK is new.

[xjiang.xj]

I think independent development of skills can be teaching oneself existing skills. It doesn't have to be making something new.