LSAT Explanation PT 35, S1, Q15: Statistician: A financial magazine claimed that

LSAT Question Stem

Each of the following, if true, would strengthen the statistician's argument EXCEPT: 

Logical Reasoning Question Type

This is a Strengthen question. 

Correct Answer

The correct answer to this question is E. 

LSAT Question Complete Explanation

The question type for this problem is Strengthen-Except, which means we are looking for the answer choice that does NOT strengthen the statistician's argument. The argument in the passage is structured as follows:

Premise 1: The financial magazine's survey question is biased.

Premise 2: The readers of the magazine are a self-selecting sample.

Conclusion: There is reason to be skeptical about the conclusion drawn in the magazine's survey.

To help you understand the argument, let's use a simple example. Imagine a survey conducted by a chocolate company asking people, "Do you prefer the happiness of eating chocolate or the taste of vegetables?" The question is biased towards chocolate, and the survey respondents are likely to be chocolate lovers since they are customers of the chocolate company. Therefore, the survey results may not accurately represent the general population's preferences.

The "Evaluate" question for this argument would be: "Do biased questions and self-selecting samples always lead to unreliable conclusions?"

Now, let's discuss the answer choices:

a) The credibility of the magazine has been called into question on a number of occasions.

This strengthens the statistician's argument by suggesting that the magazine may have a history of producing unreliable information, which gives us more reason to doubt the survey's conclusion.

b) The conclusions drawn in most magazine surveys have eventually been disproved.

This also strengthens the argument by providing evidence that magazine surveys, in general, have a poor track record of accuracy, which supports the idea that we should be skeptical about this particular survey.

c) Other surveys suggest that North Americans are just as concerned about politics as they are about finances.

This answer choice strengthens the argument by presenting conflicting evidence from other surveys, which casts further doubt on the conclusion of the magazine's survey.

d) There is reason to be skeptical about the results of surveys that are biased and unrepresentative.

This choice strengthens the argument by reinforcing the idea that surveys with biased questions and unrepresentative samples are likely to produce unreliable results.

e) Other surveys suggest that North Americans are concerned not only with politics and finances, but also with social issues.

This answer choice is correct because it does NOT strengthen the statistician's argument. The fact that North Americans also care about social issues does not provide any additional reason to doubt the magazine's survey conclusion. It is irrelevant to the argument, making it the correct answer for a Strengthen-Except question.