PrepTest 117

[lcid:3567] Prep Test 117 LSAT — Logical Reasoning — S4 Logical reasoning

Question prompt

Insurgent political parties that Remaining source text redacted.
Why the credited answer is right

Credited answer: B

The notes below walk through why it fits the stem and how to eliminate the rest.

Argument or Facts

Facts

Valid or Flawed

NA

Question Type

Argument Completion Questions

Stimulus Summary

Insurgent parties are made up of factions that disagree with each other as much as they disagree with the dominant party. They put them aside to win, but they come back up after winning. Therefore __________.

Answer Anticipation

This Argument Completion question very much describes a general scenario that we’re going to need to use to predict what is going to be true once this insurgent party wins an election and thus has the various ideologies of the factions come to the forefront. And we know these disagreements are serious - they’re “as great[]” as the differences these factions had with the ruling party.
If the party has such great differences of opinion, that’s going to be a problem for their cohesion. We should look for an answer that addresses this as a problem that they’ll need to confront. However, we should be careful with any answer choice that’s too strong or specific - while they have a problem to deal with, we don’t know how they’ll deal with it or if they’ll be successful.

Answer choices

  1. A
    no victorious insurgent party Remaining source text redacted.
    Why choice A is not credited
    This answer is too strong. While there are serious problems for this party to address, we don’t know if they’ll succeed or not, and we don’t know how long they’ll stay in power. Also, we have no idea how long the previously dominant party was in power, so this comparison is out of scope.
  2. B
    a victorious insurgent party Remaining source text redacted.
    Why choice B matches the stem
    This answer brings the information together without going too far. The insurgent party is established as having pretty serious disagreements, and so those will need to be addressed for the party not to tear itself apart. This answer doesn’t speak to whether they’ll succeed or not, or how they’ll go about addressing the issues - it just raises that there are issues they need to address.
  3. C
    the heretofore insurgent party Remaining source text redacted.
    Why choice C is not credited
    Just because the insurgent party’s factions have differing opinions doesn’t mean that they won’t be able to find a compromise ideology to work from. This answer assumes they won’t be successful in hashing out their differences, and there’s no definitive proof of that in the stimulus.
  4. D
    a victorious insurgent party Remaining source text redacted.
    Why choice D is not credited
    There’s no discussion of what happens to the ousted party, let alone a strong enough statement to establish that that party “always” sticks around in opposition.
  5. E
    it is impossible for Remaining source text redacted.
    Why choice E is not credited
    This answer is way too extreme in stating that overcoming these differences is impossible. While they’re of the scale that led them to take on the dominant party, they may decide that staying in power and effecting change is more important than some of these issues, thus allowing for compromise.

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