PrepTest 145, Section 4, Question 6
Letter to the editor: Your newspaper's advertisement claims(54 more words not shown)
The reasoning in the letter(11 more words not shown)
- Ainfers a cause(4 more words not shown)
- Bbases its conclusion(7 more words not shown)
- Cmisinterprets a key(5 more words not shown)
- Demploys as a(7 more words not shown)
- Ecriticizes the source(8 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
More students participate in track. Does that mean more students want to read about it?
The letter treats those as the same thing. Fifteen percent of students participate in track, compared with five percent in basketball, so the writer calls track the more popular sport. But popularity could mean interest in watching a sport or following its results. Many students could want to read about the basketball team even though they don't play on it. Conversely, participating in track needn't make someone interested in newspaper coverage of it.
That difference matters because the advertisement concerns sports coverage. The newspaper could cover the sports its readers most want to follow without covering the sports in which the most students participate. The numbers alone don't establish false advertising.
What we’re looking for
For the flaw question, I'd look for an answer about that shift in the meaning of “popular.” The letter measures one kind of involvement and treats it as settling a different kind of interest.
Working the answers
- A
The letter doesn't claim that one event caused another. It compares participation rates and draws a conclusion about the newspaper's advertising. We don't have a causal claim based on a correlation.
- B
The student body is the relevant population for a claim about the school's sports. The letter isn't using one school's students to draw a conclusion about students everywhere. Its problem is what the participation figures measure, not an established shortage of people in the sample.
- CCorrect
The writer reads “popular” as “having the most participants.” But in an advertisement about newspaper coverage, it could refer to the sports readers are most interested in following. More track participants don't establish more demand for track coverage. The letter's accusation depends on treating these different meanings as interchangeable.
- D
The writer offers participation figures as evidence for the accusation. Those figures don't already say the newspaper is advertising falsely. The support is inadequate, but that isn't the same as repeating the conclusion as a premise. Circular reasoning would look more like insisting that the advertisement is false because the newspaper lied in it.
- E
The letter criticizes what the newspaper covers and whether that coverage matches its advertisement. It doesn't attack an editor's character as a reason to reject the advertisement. Calling the advertisement false is the conclusion of the criticism, not a personal attack used in place of evidence.
More Flaw questions
Learn the LSAT our way
Our platform drills Flaw questions at your level and adjusts as you improve.