First Premise???

@Logan-Frye, Great question. The first sentence says, "If a society encourages freedom of thought and expression, then, during the time when it does so, creativity will flourish in that society." The first sentence can be diagrammed as EFTE - >CF /CF - >/EFTE The reason is because the middle part of the sentence, "then, during the time when it does so," is completely redundant. The first part of the sentence already defined the parameters of the conditional, so the second part of the statement is just telling us that we're in those parameters. It's like saying EFTE - ->CF EFTE Therefore, CF In fact, the middle part of the sentence could be removed with no loss of meaning. It's redundant and is put there to confuse you. However, when we see that it's just restating the sufficient condition, we see that this convoluted sentence is just a plain-old conditional statement. Does that make sense? Let us know if you have any questions!

For the argument completion drills...are you able to combine the contrapositive of one S&N condition to another non-contrapositive S&N condition to come to a conclusion? In other words, if you use one contrapositive S&N condition, are you then only able to use contrapositive S&N conditions for the other premises? Hope this makes sense!

Adding onto my last post...I'm assuming contrapositive S&N conditions can be combined with non-contrapositive S&N conditions since contrapositive and non-contrapositive conditions are both valid??

Absolutely, and doing just that is crucial - the LSAT writers try to get you to link up lots of different parts of a logical chain, sometimes using contrapositive and non-contrapositive alike.

what do you suggest when you don't know a word in a lsat question? skip it? or try your best without knowing the meaning?