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Berkeleyman5
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Question on pg. 375 MLSAT LR

by Berkeleyman5 Sat Nov 16, 2013 9:48 pm

I'm usually pretty good on formal logic and I generally only stick to the Powerscore (some and most) train methods when it comes to dealing with this kind of stuff. It's always worked really well for me.

Right now I'm going through Manhattan LSAT and have a question on one of the formal logic problem.

On one of the drill problems, it says:

"Nearly all of Jason's books are fiction books, and all of Jason's Book are written in Spanish."

I would diagram this like so:

JB--M--> F

JB-----> S

then I would combine these statements to get this.

F<--M--JB---->S

I would then reverse the most statement into a some statement and come to the conclusion that :

F<--S-->S

Some of Jason's books are fiction books written in Spanish (and vice versa).

However, the book is claiming that "Most of Jason's books are fiction books written in Spanish" is a valid inference.

Intuitively this statement makes sense, but using the some and most train I don't see how you can safely get to this inference.
Is this a typo or is there some drastic error in my formal logic thought process?
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tommywallach
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Re: Question on pg. 375 MLSAT LR

by tommywallach Mon Nov 18, 2013 5:24 pm

I don't see a typo. That's your logic chain, not ours!

I don't make any logic chains with anything other than ALL. But either way, you should just...be logical!

If NEARLY ALL the books are fiction, and all the books are in Spanish, then NEARLY ALL of his books are Spanish fiction, and a small minority are non-fiction Spanish. That's what we know!

-t
Tommy Wallach
Manhattan LSAT Instructor
twallach@manhattanprep.com
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