Logical reasoning PrepTest 111 · Section 3 · Question 17

Flawed

Errors in Reasoning Questions

Of all service workers, only a small percentage make it on to a Board (top 600 NA)

This argument starts with a discussion of percentages, which suggest a Percent vs. Amount flaw. However, the conclusion is also about percentages (“underrepresented” means that there is a smaller percentage on the boards than expected based on the population), so we don’t have that flaw here.

We can check to see if there is a term shift, but the premise is about the top North American corporations, and the conclusion is about them, as well. (Sure, the premise is about the 600 largest, and the conclusion is about the “most important” ones, but the LSAT is unlikely to consider that a shift worth testing - let’s keep it in mind, though, just in case.)

With those considerations out of the way, we’ll have to circle back to see if there’s a shift in the specific percentages that the argument raises.

Let’s start with the premise. There, it talks about the percentage of service workers who end up on Boards. So if you take the total number of workers, a small percentage of them get appointed to boards.

Now, the conclusion. There, it talks about service workers being underrepresented on corporate Boards. What does that mean? Well, it means that if you look at the percentage of service workers on Boards, it’s much smaller than the percentage of service workers in the overall population.

But that doesn’t follow from so few service workers ending up on Boards! After all, let’s say each Board features 10 members - so there are 6,000 seats. If half of those members are service workers - 3,000 - that probably represents an exceptionally small portion of all service workers since there are millions of service workers.