Q15 - One's palate is to a great extent

[mrudula_2005]

Hi,

For some reason I am not seeing how D is wrong - I thought that it was the contrapositive of the principle in the stimulus:

"If we notice that a lot of people enjoy consuming a certain type of food, we will eventually come to like the food as well..."

the contrapositive being,

"If we have not come to like a food, we did not notice that a lot of people enjoyed consuming it" - which I thought matched D...Yolanda does not like pickles (satisfying the sufficient statement for the contrapositive) and she has observed many of her relatives not liking them (or is 'observing many people not liking something' not the same as 'not noticing that a lot of people enjoyed consuming it' ?)

at the same time, I do see how answer choice D can be seen as negating the princinple and assuming the inverse of it is true....i'm torn here.

Essentially, where does my contraposing of the principle to make it fit D, go wrong?

What would be the proper conditional representation of D? Does "because" signal a sufficient condition?? If so, then clearly I see how D only inverts the principle in the stimulus and is definitely not a contrapositive and is thus wrong.

Thank you so much!

[giladedelman]

(or is 'observing many people not liking something' not the same as 'not noticing that a lot of people enjoyed consuming it' ?)

DING DING DING DING DING!!!!!!

You nailed it again! You did a great job turning the statement into a conditional:

notice people enjoying type of food ---> come to like that food

And the contrapositive is indeed:

DON'T come to like the food ---> didn't notice people enjoying it

But the example in answer (D) gives us someone who notices people not enjoying the food. Does that mean the same thing as not noticing people who enjoy it? No!!! Consider this true statement:

I know a lot of people who aren't men.

Does that mean the same thing as this?:

I don't know a lot of people who are men.

NO; in fact, I'll have you know that I have many friends of both genders.

So the fact that Yolanda has noticed family members not enjoying pickles tells us precisely NOTHING about whether she's observed people actually enjoying them. Maybe she has, maybe she hasn't.

Does that answer your question?

[mrudula_2005]

great - thanks so much. how would you represent answer choice D in formal logic? Or can you not do so? I'm trying to figure out if "because" signals necessity or sufficiency...so would it be:

If Y observed many of her relatives wince when eating pickles --> Y dislikes pickles

or would it be the other way around:

If Y dislikes pickles --> Y has observed many of her relatives wince when eating them

I would think it's the first of these 2 which is another reason why D is way off...

is the first of the two correct?

thanks again!

[giladedelman]

Be careful! You're pulling the "if, then" out of whole cloth here!

Only categorical statements -- that is, statements about something that is always the case -- can be converted into conditionals. In the case of answer (D), all we have is a fact and a reason for that fact; in other words, a premise and a conclusion. Yolanda saw X, therefore Y.

What we don't have is a statement that can be converted into "if, then" format.

[skapur777]

Is E incorrect because she has grown accustomed to the food but we don't know if her family enjoys consuming them (though it can be implied by the fact that her family members use them frequently?), and most importantly we don't know that "eat them without discomfort" means she enjoys them?

[giladedelman]

Exactly! And in fact, I don't think we can infer that her family enjoys them just because they use them frequently. Maybe they use them frequently because they're healthy, or it's all they can afford, or something. So here we have neither the sufficient nor the necessary condition that we're looking for.

As for the others:

(A) ends up with Maxine loving pasta, which is good, but it doesn't have the sufficient condition. She's supposed to see people enjoying it, not just talk about it.

(B) is basically a mistaken negation of our principle.

(C) is correct because George observes his family liking pierogis (who doesn't???), which leads him to start enjoying them. That's exactly how our principle says it should work.

[wj097]

My 2cents here.

P1: Know lot of ppl enjoy it
P2: One gets accustomed to it (i.e., actually tried out)
C: One eventually likes it

So (C) perfectly fits the bill.
P1: Relatives love it
P2: George stayed w/ relatives for several summers (can infer that George got accustomed to it - the word "By" gives us this idea)
C: George got to like it

While wrong answer choices somehow touch on P1 and C either correctly or in negated version, none mentions P2, except maybe (A).

[nflamel69]

Can we assume that because they wince that they are not enjoying pickles? I thought that was rather a big jump there. Could've been they are just too sour for them

[lsatzen]

When I was reading through the stimulus, I noticed both the conditional language being used and the term "a lot".

While I was going through the answer choices I used both of these characteristics to eliminate answer choices.

(B ) and ( D ) were easy eliminations.

I eliminated ( A ) because it doesn't satisfy the sufficient condition AND the fact that talking to her individual / singular neighbor does not qualify as "a lot".

I eliminated ( E ) because, much like ( A ), we don't know if she has noticed that her family enjoys them (i.e. sufficient condition is not triggered). All she has noticed is the frequency at which they used them in their cooking. But, I also eliminated it because we don't know how many family members the the answer choice is referring to. It is too ambiguous. It uses the plural form so we know its at least 2, but 2 is hardly "a lot".

However, does ( C ) fall under the same scrutiny as ( A ) and ( E ), since it is completely plausible that George's Ukrainian relatives might have suffered some terrible tragedy that reduced their headcount down to two?

Was the term "a lot" non-essential? Did I just get lucky?

[ohthatpatrick]

I think you're correct about the conditional and about the "a lot".

The problem you have with (C) isn't a real problem. First of all, you normally don't use "all" to describe a quantity of two. For instance, you wouldn't say "all of my parents love me", unless you had a non-traditional family with more than two parents.

So you can infer that "all" is at least three.

I would say "three" doesn't qualify as "a lot", but you shouldn't be resorting to exotic scenarios like "what if all but three of George's Ukrainian relatives are dead"?

At the beginning of every LR section, the test instructs you to NOT make any assumptions that are by commonsense standards "implausible, superfluous, or incompatible with each passage".

Another big picture idea is that you're searching for the BEST answer, not the PERFECT answer.

LSAT students get so good at reading tightly for every little nuance and loophole that they sometimes talk themselves into a paralyzed state by undercutting EVERY answer.

Find good dealbreakers for 4 of them and live with the imperfections of the decent one that remains.

Our conditional is
Notice a lot of ppl enjoying consuming a food AND give yourself time to get accustomed --> you'll eventually like it

As you noted, (B) and (D) are easy to eliminate because they try to prove that someone would NOT like it, which this rule cannot do.

(A) and (E) have nothing to do with observing ppl enjoying consuming a food. In both, we just see people cooking the food.

Moreover, (E) doesn't result in Sally ENJOYING consuming peppers, merely "eating them without discomfort".

Hope this helps.