Logical reasoning PrepTest 151 · Section 3 · Question 11

Incorrect. This answer is flawed because it's too strong (unnecessary) and doesn't establish that safety inspections aren't themselves what has led to the decrease in accidents.

Incorrect. This answer is flawed because it treats potential causality as a sufficient/necessary relationship, when causality can exist even if not every time the cause is present, the effect is as well.

Correct. Argument or Facts:
Argument

Valid or Flawed:
Flawed

Question Type:
Flawed Parallel Reasoning

Stimulus Summary:
As more cars were made, people got healthier. So saying car emissions caused bad health is wrong.

Answer Anticipation:
This argument is interesting in that it clearly deals with correlation vs. causation, but the real flaw lies somewhere else. One hint that this is the case is that the conclusion is that there isn't a causal relationship, not that there is one.

Instead, this argument makes an error in reasoning related to a comparison when it says people got healthier. This is comparing health against the baseline of people before cars were mass produced, but it doesn't compare it against how healthy people would be in a world where cars were never made, which is the relevant comparison. While people's health may have improved at the same time cars were getting adopted by most people, it's possible health would have improved even more without cars polluting for the past hundred years.

Answer Explanation:
This answer is correct. It compares accident rates pre-cell phone and post-cell phone, when the necessary comparison to draw this conclusion is post-cell phone to a world where cell phones never existed (or, say, by looking at the population of people who don't have cell phones to determine their accident rates). It's possible cell phones drove accidents up, while other safety features (like proximity alerts) brought the accidents down overall.

Key Takeaway:
Just because an argument features correlative and causal language doesn't mean that it's committing a correlation vs. causation flaw. In recent years in particular the LSAT has had many argument where the author rules out causation, which requires a different approach than the normal correlation vs. causation strategies.

Incorrect. This answer only deals with one metric—skydiver safety. To be parallel to the stimulus, it would need to deal with another metric that correlated with skydiver safety.

Incorrect. This answer is just bad advice. It also doesn't parallel an argument that uses a correlation to justify the elimination of a causal relationship.