[khwalton]

Hi,

I am struggling to understand the explanation for the Sarah & her out-of-town friends.

I had exactly the same set-up, with the exception of someone having to be in spots 3 & 9, which confuses me.

Can someone explain? Here is my logic, if helpful:

Q1) If P visits in July, M has to be in April. I don’t understand why N must visit in September. If Q visits in March, O has to be in June so two consecutive months aren’t empty. But since P is in July, why can’t N be in either August or September (since no consecutive month will be empty?). If Q visits in June, March can be empty because M is in April, so there aren’t two consecutive months unfilled, meaning O could visit in March, August, or September, with N filling in whatever is left over (being August/September).

Where am I going wrong? Because I am considering the above, I only considered M to be fixed for Q2, which is also wrong.

Having a rough day!

[LSAT Dan]

I had the same problem you had, at first, until I noticed the circles in spots 3 and 9 (March and September) in the diagram. I think we can chalk this one up perhaps to a subtle ambiguity in the setup. We’re told that Sarah “will host five out-of-town friends…at her house over the course of seven months – the first ONE in March and the last one in September.

I’m pretty sure Mike intended the word “ONE” (emphasis added) to refer to the friends, though it could be read (and was by both of us) as referring to the months. That is to say, you apparently thought that the first of the months was March and the last was September, and the friends could visit in any five of those months. I believe, though, that the intended implication was that the first friend visited in March, and the last in September.

With that in mind, consider two different cases, one when Q visits in March, and the other when Q visits in June. We know that these are the only possibilities for Q, which has to precede P.

If Q visits in March, then O must visit in June in order to prevent consecutive blank months in May and June. Reading the setup to suggest that the last friend visits in September, there’s nobody left but N.

If Q visits in June, that leaves N and O. But on this reading of the setup, one of them has to visit in March, and that can’t be N. So it’s O who must visit in March, again leaving N as the only friend who can visit in September.

So the short answer is, you’re not crazy! On your interpretation of the setup, your analysis is spot-on.

[jogaz]

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