Q11 - Teacher to a student: You agree

[greatwhiteshark100]

Hey guys, I really don't get why the answer is D and not E. Thanks!

[ManhattanPrepLSAT2]

Coincidentally, I just got through editing a solution for this question for one of our publications -- I'll step across some lines and post that explanation here - hope it helps!

Here's the core of the argument:

There is an implicit promise to tell the truth when speaking to another. +
It is bad to break a promise. → You should not lie about Jeanne being home sick, even if you promised her to do so.

This is a tricky argument to evaluate. Remember that our job is not to evaluate the premises. We must accept, for example, that there is an implicit promise to tell the truth when speaking with others. Instead, we must read like a debater and consider why the student might be justified in lying to the teacher. This isn’t that hard to do if you put yourself in the poor student’s shoes. He’s actually made a promise to lie on Jeanne’s behalf. He would be breaking that promise if he tells the teacher the truth. What a bind! More importantly for solving this question, what a gap! How is this student to decide which promise he should honor? This is what (D) resolves so that the teacher’s argument is valid. If we negate (D) _ there are no implicit promises that are worse to break than any explicit ones _ we’d be left wondering why the student should honor the implicit promise when it’s not worse to break that compared to breaking the explicit one he made to Jeanne.

(A) is out of scope. We don’t care what most people are doing.

(B) is tempting since is seems to address the conflict between the competing promises. But in fact, it is out of scope since the argument is not about best interests. Furthermore, we can’t say whether lying for Jeanne is in her best interest.

(C) is about consequences, making this answer out of scope as well.

(E) is quite tempting. It sounds like the sort of thing the teacher would agree with. "Don’t lie to me," the teacher might say, "You’ve made an implicit promise to tell the truth when speaking to me, and you should never break a promise!" However, the student, if he had his LSAT wits about him, would reply "But you’re asking me to break my promise to Jeanne!" Indeed, the argument actually requires us to assume, as (D) notes, that one should break certain promises in order to honor others.

[ttunden]

I don't really understand how you negated D.

Isn't the negation : Some implicit promises are not worse to break than some explicit ones?

why did you negate it as : No implicit promises are worse to break than any explicit ones.

Thanks for the explanation, it was helpful.

Can you elaborate more on why C is wrong? D talks a little about consequences in a way too.

[ttunden]

I don't really understand how you negated D.

Isn't the negation : Some implicit promises are not worse to break than some explicit ones?

why did you negate it as : No implicit promises are worse to break than any explicit ones.

Thanks for the explanation, it was helpful.

Can you elaborate more on why C is wrong? D talks a little about consequences in a way too.

Anyone?

[cecile_lv]

I don't really understand how you negated D.

Isn't the negation : Some implicit promises are not worse to break than some explicit ones?

why did you negate it as : No implicit promises are worse to break than any explicit ones.

Thanks for the explanation, it was helpful.

Can you elaborate more on why C is wrong? D talks a little about consequences in a way too.

Hey ttunden,
I made a same choice as yours when I initially did this one.
And now I realize why C is not the correct one.
1) "Breaking a promise" is not equal to "breaking an implicit promise". this slight change can actually make a huge different, and in fact this is the fatal weakness in this answer. we are told that "it is bad to break promises" and this phrase followed by a signal word "BUT", which should address you to make a difference between "promise" and implicit promise". In other words, breaking a Promise can be a bad thing, but breaking an "Implicit" one is not necessarily bad. It may sometimes be better to keep. Like the situation of this poor student. The "implicit" promise is the student tell the teacher that Jeanne is sick though she is not. The "explicit" one is the promise the student made with Jeanne. Therefore, the teacher actually intends to think that "it would be worse to lie to me since you know you are lying than you break the promise with Jeanne (since she is actually lying indirectly to me)".
2) And besides, there is no any mention of what a Consequence would be. But you should eliminate this answer once you notice the distinction between "promise" and "implicit" promise.

Hope this can help.

[littletiger]

Hey guys, I really don't get why the answer is D and not E. Thanks!

I think it's helpful to read others' trains of thought to see how they approached a question, so here's my train of thought. Maybe it will illuminate a new angle.

I got this question wrong as well. I choose E, like you. My next guess would have been C. But during review, I saw that answer D was very clearly right.

First, I go to the question to see what I should be looking for. The teacher is missing a premise.

The teacher is saying (paraphrased): It's bad to break promises. You made an explicit promise to Jeanne that you'd lie for her. But lying is like breaking an implicit promise. So you should break your promise to Jeanne.

My alarm is going off here. The question I immediately ask is: why shouldn't the student lie? What makes lying worse than breaking the promise you made to a friend? After all, both involve breaking a promise. This argument must be missing a premise, just as we knew it would.

I look to the choices to find the missing premise.

• (A) is wrong because most people doing something does not mean the student should do the same.


• (B) is wrong because the friend's best interest is not a consideration in the argument.


• (C), which was my second choice, is wrong because 1) a lie is breaking a promise, so this answer is incoherent--how could breaking a promise lead to worse consequences than breaking a promise? My mistake was forgetting that a lie is breaking a promise.


• (D) is correct because the teacher's argument relies on the assumption that telling the truth, an implicit promise, is worse than breaking an explicit promise (the one the student made to her friend).


• (E), which was my first choice, is wrong because the teacher is telling the student to break her promise to Jeanne.

[mkd000]

I don't really understand how you negated D.

Isn't the negation : Some implicit promises are not worse to break than some explicit ones?

why did you negate it as : No implicit promises are worse to break than any explicit ones.

Thanks for the explanation, it was helpful.

Can you elaborate more on why C is wrong? D talks a little about consequences in a way too.

Your negation is incorrect. "some A are B" cannot be negated as "some A are not B". These two statements are not necessarily inconsistent with one another. For example, if there is a Farm Market stand with 3 Apples and 1 Orange, we can say "some of the fruits at the Farm Market are Oranges". If we wanted to negate that statement, "some of the fruits at the FM are not Oranges" does not do the job. Why? Because there are 3 Apples, so it is true that "some of the fruits at the FM are not Oranges". The correct way of logically negating the first statement would be "no fruits at the FM stand are Oranges".

So, the way you negated the (D) in this question is not necessarily a true negation of the statement, because it allows for the initial phrasing of (D) to stand. And the logical opposite of "some" is "none".