[lawnorder003]

Its a condition substitution question for a game about scheduling appointments. What criteria am I looking for in teh correct answer, and how can I go through and eliminate wrong answers efficiently?

[Mike Kim]

Hey —

Here’s a quick diagram I drew up to try the problem out — I did this quickly and didn’t play the whole game, and I imagine there may be inferences I missed / other ways to diagram, but anyway, should work fine for this discussion —

Okay, so in terms of the rule in question, I take a quick look at what the consequence of that rule was — that it told me T should go in 1, 4, or 5, and the impact it has on other elements — specifically, I know G and S have to go toward the tail end, so where T goes has some impact on where they go.

With those things in mind, I go into the answers wanting a right answer that doesn’t create anything noticeably different for T or any other element, and, more importantly, I’m focused on seeing why 4 answers will create a different situation from the one I designed.

(A) on the surface, I can’t see why this would change things, so I left it.

(B) presents a different situation than what I have — I know, per the first frame in my diagram, that T doesn’t have to be immed. before G or S, and so I can eliminate it.

(C) doesn’t have to be true at all (per 2nd and 3rd frames) and I can quickly eliminate.

(D) doesn’t have to be true, and I know that because we don’t have any clues that differentiate G from S (we are told same info about them, so I can’t know something specific about G that I don’t know about S)

(E) is somewhat tempting (perhaps the most tempting of the wrong choices) but there is no reason, in the original game, that L can’t go last, and (E) eliminates that possibility, and so we can cut (E) as well.

That leaves us with only (A)  — in a clever way (A) does indeed tell us same thing as the original rule does — even in situations in which L is last, because in those situations G and S would have to fill in slots 4 and 5 (in either order) T would have to go in front of G and S anyway.

I would have never been able to anticipate (A), but fairly easy to confirm after eliminating wrong choices.

In terms of general advice about rule substitution q’s — if you have the Trainer, I discuss them in lesson 27, so you can check that out  — also, I wrote a (way too long) paper about them years ago when i was at  mlsat — here it  is — https://s3.amazonaws.com/mprep_documents/hosted/public/LSAT/download/er_whitepaper_updated20111106.pdf

Hope that helps and let me know if you have any follow up —

MK