Logical Reasoning Answers
This is the fourth of a series of articles on LSAT Logical Reasoning. The series contains the following articles:
LSAT Logical Reasoning: An Introduction
Logical Reasoning Questions
Logical Reasoning Arguments
Logical Reasoning Answers
Logical Reasoning Elimination
Logical Reasoning Answers
After you learn to paraphrase arguments, the next step is to prephrase the logical reasoning answers. Creating your own logical reasoning answers is essential to your success on the LSAT. We cannot emphasize that enough, so we’ll say it again. If you want to move quickly through the LSAT and earn a high score, you must learn to write your own logical reasoning answers — before reading the answers they provide you.
Coming up with your own logical reasoning answers is hard to do at first, but as you gain familiarity with the styles of questions and answer choices it will get easier. Prephrasing usually is about finding the red flag in the argument. The red flag points to the assumption and most LSAT questions ask you to deal with the assumption in some fashion.
There are several reasons why you must prephrase your logical reasoning answer if you want to succeed on the LSAT test. First, prephrasing saves you time. If you see a logical reasoning answer choice that matches your prephrase, you can immediately mark that answer with confidence. It’s impossible for there to be two right answers in logical reasoning, so if you see your right answer among the choices, mark it and move on. There’s no need to waste time considering the other choices. And the odds of your prephrased logical reasoning answer being wrong in exactly the same way one of the wrong answers is phrased is low.
You also learn more about the LSAT test and gain confidence each time you prephrase. Prephrasing logical reasoning answers forces you to think like the test maker. In addition, when you see that the answer you came up with on your own matches one of the answer choices, your confidence soars.
Prephrasing won’t always work — you’re in a hurry on the test and some logical reasoning answers are not the most obvious answers — but as you practice, it will work for you more and more. For example, there may be several assumptions made in an argument and the question asks you to identify one of them. You prephrase the main assumption, but this time the right answer deals with another assumption.
Even if it didn’t lead you directly to the right answer, prephrasing is still helpful because it got you thinking about possible assumptions and about the scope of the argument.
Unfortunately, some question stems are not susceptible to prephrasing. The All/EXCEPT question stem, such as, “all of the following are assumptions in the author’s argument EXCEPT,” basically asks you to come up with four assumptions and then cross them out as wrong. Prephrasing might help you find one or two of the “wrong” answers in this case, but you certainly won’t be able to prephrase the exception.
In the next article in this series on LSAT Logical Reasoning, we’ll move from logical reasoning answers to logical reasoning elimination.