A society in which there are many crimes, such as thefts and murders, should not be called "lawless." That is an abus...

Claire on April 17, 2019


I narrowed down the answer choices to D and E but I am not sure how to differentiate between the two. Thanks!

3 Replies

Jacob on April 18, 2019

Hi @claire_crites,

Iâ€™m happy to help. In order to decide between D and E, letâ€™s take a close look at exactly what the question stem is asking.

We can tell right away that this is a â€œmust be trueâ€ question. And I can see why the two answers choices you selected are both appealing â€” they both seem to be saying very similar things about the relationship between societies with crimes and laws.

The key difference is the degree: answer D says:

Some crime -> some laws

Whereas answer E says

Many crimes -> many laws

What statement in the passage can tell us which one of these answers must be true?

Notice the premise in the middle of the passage: a society with no laws has no crimes. How would we diagram that statement?

No laws -> no crimes.

What is the contrapositive of that statement?

Crimes -> laws.

And notice that that positive framing also means we have found our correct answer, as the plural â€œcrimesâ€ means there must be some crime, and the plural â€œlawsâ€ means that there must be at least some laws! So the correct answer is D. (Nothing in the passage tells us that the degree in this causal relationship would be â€œmanyâ€ for both crimes and laws.)

I hope that helps! Please let us know if you have further questions.

Faith on April 28 at 04:09PM

Why is A wrong?

Emma on June 12 at 07:08AM

Hello, the thing that is puzzling me is that I thought "many" and "some" were equivalent in the context of the LSAT. Please explain to me the difference.