LSAT 144 | Section 4 | Logical Reasoning: Q3

LR Question 3 Explanation

QUESTION TEXT: The official listing of an animal species as endangered…

QUESTION TYPE: Paradox

PARADOX: Listing a species as endangered provides legal support to keep that species alive. Yet sometimes species decline faster after they are declared endangered.

ANALYSIS: On paradox questions, you have to do two things:

1. Figure out why the situation is confusing.
2. Find something that explains the situation.

Most people fail one job or the other. You can’t explain a situation unless you know where the confusion lies. And then you need to actually explain it. A lot of trap answers are merely true, but explain nothing.

Here, the confusion is that legal safeguards seem to make the situation worse. We might expect regulations to be ineffective, but it’s very surprising that they actively harm the animals. The explanation must be that there’s also a negative effect related to being declared endangered.

___________

1. This doesn’t explain why the decline sometimes increases after the declaration finally happens.
2. This could explain why cute animals are more likely to be declared endangered. But so what? This does nothing to explain why some declines accelerate after a declaration that a species is endangered.
3. This might show that legal resources to protect animals are spread more thin. So the protections could be less helpful. But this doesn’t explain why a decline would increase after a species was declared endangered.
4. CORRECT. If a species is declared endangered, then people will think it’s rare. So this answer shows that a declaration of “endangered” can increase poaching for that species. Yikes!
5. This is just a fact about poaching. It gives a reason why poaching would decrease as an animal gets rarer. This explains nothing about what happens when an animal gets declared endangered.