One of the Hardest LSAT Questions – @!#$%@# Dioxin!
Like snowflakes of intellectual pain, the hardest LSAT question is different for each and every one of us – it’s up to us to look into our hearts and find the question that is burning a hole through an artery. For me, that was PT45, S1, Q12 – the dioxin question. Oh how we fought, oh how we struggled!
Let me walk you through our relationship.
The conclusion of the argument is that, as opposed to what most people are thinking, dioxin released from a mill does NOT cause fish to have abnormal hormone levels. Why? Two premises are given to support this – and here’s where we had our first fight L: dioxin decomposes quite slowly and when the mill shuts down, the fishy hormone levels quickly return to normal.
At this point, me and question 12 were still on speaking terms, but when I looked at her answer choices, oh the pain! The correct answer – the one that most weakens the argument – states that dioxin actually is washed away pretty quickly from the mill area. Sounds painless enough – until you think about it! How does that weaken that argument? I was lost.
My colleague Matt Sherman cleared it up for me with a great forum explanation. You can go read it, but I’d rather tell you in my own words as a program of catharsis. Breathe deeply…OK, here we go:
So, the argument starts by telling us about a supposed causal relationship – folks are suggesting that dioxin might cause the fishy hormone levels to freak out. The author disagrees—he feels that dioxin is unlikely to be the cause—and attempts to discredit the causal claim. How does he do that? Let’s look at a simpler example to clear that up:
It’s been raining all week, and now I have tons of warts. Apparently, rain landing on your skin causes warts.
How would you weaken that claim? There are a few ways:
1. Show that there’s another cause: evil thoughts cause warts!
2. Show that someone else got rained on and no warts appeared.
3. Show that warts appeared when there was no rainfall. (so, something else is causing them)
Pretty straightforward so far! Now, let’s change the argument:
It’s been raining for a week, and Tom now has tons of warts. Tom concluded that rain landing on skin causes warts. But it was raining all last summer, and nobody got even one wart, ever. So, it is unlikely that Tom is correct.
That seems like a good way to discredit that claim, right? It’s basically #2. But now, in a strange twist of LSAT fate, we must weaken that entire argument! How would we do that? Before you read on, what would you say?
You might say this: Yes, it rained, but everyone was indoors the entire summer, enjoying air conditioning, so the rain never touched our skin.
In effect, what we’ve done is said that “raining all last summer” did not actually disprove the original claim. The argument tried to show that the alleged cause, (rain on skin), happened without the effect, (warts), occurring, but in fact there wasn’t a situation in which we had our supposed cause.
Let’s get back to dioxin (by the way, I think dioxin sounds very tasty).
Here’s the original claim: The fish have strange hormone levels and are exposed to dioxin; one possible explanation is that dioxin caused the hormone freak-out.
And here’s the full argument: The fish have strange hormone levels and are exposed to dioxin; one possible explanation is that dioxin caused the hormone freak-out.
But that’s not true because we have a case of dioxin without a hormone freak-out. Let me explain: even though the mill shut down there was still dioxin (since it takes a LONG time to decompose), and we didn’t see a hormone freak-out! You can’t conclude it was the dioxin!
To weaken that, let’s add in the correct answer: dioxin gets washed away quickly by the stream. This allows us to say this: Hey, when the mill shut down, the dioxin actually did leave the premises, so you haven’t proved jack!
What a strange question. If you’re interested, try your hand at this one:
As cities have become more crowded, we’ve seen a lot more cases of schizophrenia in urban centers. People say that overcrowding has caused these higher rates of schizophrenia. However, I disagree! Five years ago, the city of Toledo built enough housing to accommodate every single person in the city, and since then, the city’s population has not expanded, there has been no change in the rate of schizophrenia since then.
Can you weaken that argument using the same sort of maneuver that was used in the dioxin question?
Post your answer! Good luck! And thanks for letting me get that off my chest.