Ding ding ding! The Princess Bride! One of the all-time greats, if you haven’t seen it you’re really missing out.
And that, in a rather roundabout way, brings me to the purpose of my email.
One of the most annoying things about the LSAT is it tends to use words we are familiar with in ways we aren’t used to. There are way more of these than there should be, but today I’m focusing on quantifiers.
Quantifiers are numbers that indicate a number of something and the LSAT can be a bit deceptive about how it uses them.
I’m going to go over two of them here:
Several / Many
If I told you that I have a box of a 100 chocolate-chip cookies, I confirmed that several of them are tasty, you wouldn't truly know how many I ate, or how many of them are actually tasty.
"Several" and "many" refer to some kind of sizable (and plural) number, so we know it's more than one or two, but how many exactly? It's impossible to say. This is an indeterminate number. Like most/majority, it allows the possibility of all.
Several / Many = a range of more than 2 - all the way up to 100%
For purposes of simplicity, we can think of it as 3 - 100% or 3 - all.
Some
Let's suppose I catch you stuffing your face with cookies from that 100-cookie box. I ask, "How many did you eat?" You reply, ""Some..."
Vague, right? Maybe you ate only 1, or maybe you had 5, 10, 49, 75, 99, or 100. Without more information, we don't know just how many you ate.
Like the many/majority example, making a claim regarding "some" does not exclude the possibility that "all" have that characteristic, whether it's with regard to how many of them were delicious or just how many were eaten.
In order to know that you hadn't eaten all the cookies, you would've needed to specifically claim that you had eaten "some, but not all", so I'll know that there's still at least 1 cookie remaining for me to eat.
Some = a range from 1 - all the way up to 100%
For purposes of simplicity, we can think of it as 1 - 100% or 1 - all.
Like I said, annoying. But, it’s important to know so you don’t get tripped up on something simple.
If you found that helpful, I wrote an article with a whole lot more for you to read on quantifier words - here's the link ---->
Talk soon,
LSAT Steve, the Vocal Machine
P.S. If this gave you a bit of a headache, don’t worry. Next time we’ll be talking about something more relatable (another famous movie), so it’s sure to be a more enjoyable read.
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2. Logical Reasoning Explanations
The explanations that should have come with the LSAT. These don't just fall back on "out of scope," but actually tell you why the wrong answers are wrong, why the right answers are right, and the easiest way to get the correct answer.
3. Logical Reasoning Cheat Sheet
Based on what I'd typically do in college: read what the professor emphasized and condense it all onto a single piece of paper. It gave me a quick reference, making things a lot less threatening and a lot more manageable.
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