Logical Reasoning · Flaw
PrepTest 124 · Section 3 · Question 2
Phase 1 (your first ~400 questions): read the guidance, then answer. No clock.
Step 1 · Pre-Question Guidance · read this first
- “yet”
- “still”
- “so”
Playground logic
Marcus sees the treehouse floor getting wetter even after Owen's tape and calls the tape useless. That is a Bad Comparison: he never asks how soaked the floor would be with no tape at all.
Step 2 · The kid story
Owen's Tape Job
Every spring the treehouse roof leaks. This year Owen climbed up with three rolls of duct tape and patched every crack he could find. Then the rainy weeks came, and the floor got wetter and wetter. By May, Owen himself admitted the puddles were bigger than in March. Marcus put on his detective hat. 'Case closed. You taped the roof, and the floor still got wetter. Tape is not the answer, Owen.' Lulu tapped her clipboard. 'Hold on. It rained way more in May than in March. Maybe without tape we would need a canoe up here.' Owen brightened. 'So the tape could be working, just not winning?' Lulu nodded. 'Getting worse is not the same as getting worse because of the tape.'
Step 3 · Try the model question
Owen patched the treehouse roof with tape in March. Since then, the treehouse floor has gotten wetter, as Owen himself admits. Clearly, taping is not the way to fix the leaks.
A critic of this reasoning would most reasonably point out that it
Step 4 · The courtroom tale
The Case of the Night Guard
A toy museum hired a night guard, but thefts kept climbing. The owner sued the guard company. 'Thefts went up after you came,' she said. 'Your guard is no solution.' Mr. Whitfield rose, suspenders snapping. 'Your Honor, the museum doubled its toys and stayed open later during that same year. The question is not whether thefts rose. It is whether they would have risen even faster with no guard.' He placed a chart on the easel. The museum next door, same size, no guard, lost three times as much. Judge Okafor peered at it. 'So the guard may have been holding back a flood, not causing a drip.'
Step 5 · Work the real question
Open PrepTest 124, Section 3, Question 2 in your official copy from LSAC (for example in LawHub) and read it there.
Your answer
How to apply it
Find the conclusion: some fix is not the answer. Find the evidence: things kept getting worse after the fix arrived. Ask yourself what the argument never compared. Predict a flaw about ignoring how things would have gone without the fix. Check each choice against that prediction, and drop ones that name problems the argument does not actually have or that bring in people the argument never relies on.