A new government policy has been developed to avoid many

Hi Grace,

I think the Answer is likely to be D. Whilst both C and D are assumptions, answer C has already been mentioned in the question Each year’s vaccination will protect only against the strain of the influenza virus deemed most likely to be prevalent that year

Hope that helps.

Happy to run through the rest of the options if that helps.

Cheers,

James

The premise, goes on to describe the government policy and how the vaccine will be administered.

The conclusion is -


so every year it will be necessary for all high-risk individuals to receive a vaccine for a different strain of the virus.


The question stem reads:

The relationship can be represented as P (premise) + A(assumption) ---> Conclusion; Which means we are in search of an assumption which will ENABLE the conclusion to become logical, therefore the test maker concedes that their are some apparent HOLES in the argument. At this point we can try to paraphrase or move onto the answer choices..

Lets keep the Premise and conclusion in mind so that we can attack the answer choices:

(A)

The number of individuals in the high-risk
group for influenza will not significantly
change from year to year.

If we add this assumption to the premise provided, do we get a logical conclusion? Even if the no. of people in the group do not change or change it will have no bearing on whether those people would need or not need the vaccine next year. WE CAN SAFELY move on ..

(B)



The likelihood of the virus occurring has nothing to do with the repeated inoculation of a different type of vaccine (strain).. Even if the incidence of influenca epidemic drops significantly we have no indication from either the passage or the answer choice which suggests that the government will roll back its decision to vaccinate people. The argument still remains in the same LOGICAL position as it existed in the original passage (we are to strengthen this logical position of the argument through the introduction of an assumption)

(C)



A Basic requirement in any assumption question is that the assumption must be an ADDITIONAL PREMISE. This is a craftily worded paraphrase of an all ready mentioned premise : " Each year’s vaccination will protect only against the strain of the influenza virus" , Therefore this FAILS the test ( P + A ---> Conclusion)

(D)



This is the correct answer. The assumption fills one major HOLE in the argument (something which some may be able to paraphrase before reviewing the answer choices). If someone made this argument to me (passage). I could rebut by saying " What if you have 2-3 consecutive years where every year a similar strain will be considered dangerous" " would your conclusion not be FALSE then?" If you wanted to WIN the argument, you can rebut by saying " Each year the strain of influenza virus deemed most likely to be prevalent will be one that had not previously been deemed most likely to be prevalent. "..And you will win the argument

This meets the P + A --> Conclusion test as it makes the overall argument more logical.

(E)



This answer choice is out of scope, as it goes on a different tangent altogether and is the easiest one to eliminate because of that !

Hope this helps

OA : D

This question becomes so much easier, if we take a bit of time to write down the premise and conclusion on our scratch pads before we begin searching for the correct assumption ( this way we can easily realize that C is a rewording of a pre existing premise so that we can avoiding falling into the trap)...
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I chose answer C - but to be honest, it was a tossup for me between C & D. Both seem correct to me.

The conclusion is that the high-risk group will need to be vaccinated every year.

Answer C seems like a necessary assumption - as if some vaccines protected against multiple strains of the virus, annual vaccination may not be necessary.

Likewise, answer D seems like a necessary assumption - as if the same strain broke out year after year, the high risk group would already have been vaccinated against it, mitigating the need for repeat vaccination.

James -

Thanks! Your explanation was very helpful. I was missing that detail in the original paragraph that all vaccinations would only be protecting against a single strain. Should have gone back and read it again! Anyhow, many thanks for the help.

All the best -

D is better than C for 2 reasons.

First, C is too extreme because of "no vaccine"
Secondly, because of "vaccine for different strain", D is the winner

My answer : D

The conclusion says "different strain" -> this means a new strain becomes prevalant every new year. Option C was appealing but no where it was mentioned that vaccines are aimed at one single stain.

hi

I am feeling very good to get this CR right
let me explain to you how

For any argument to hod true, assumptions must hold true. Here in the question, choice "c" states something that does not have to be true for the conclusion to hold true. Yes, taking vaccine for different strain of virus every year does not mean that no vaccine can cure more than one strain of that virus

Now, say, virus "P" was prevalent in the year, 2016, so, for the conclusion to hold true it must be assumed that this "P" virus cannot be prevalent in the year 2017, or if the "P" virus is prevalent in the year 2017, it must be assumed that this "P" virus was not prevalent in the year 2016, so people have to take different vaccination each year ...

So answer choice "D" stands out
thanks

cheers through the kudos button, if this helps you

The key trick part of this question seems to reside on C or D, so let's focus on that after we BOIL down the argument.

High-risk individuals needs vaccination to protect against the DAMN flu.
Every year's vaccination only protects against the most prevalent version of DAMN flu.
=> High-risk individuals need vaccination every year.


(C) No vaccine for the influenza virus protects against more than one strain of that virus.
Negate: Some vaccines for DAMN flu protects against more than 1 strain. Ok, so potentally if a high-risk individual is LUCKY and got a flu shot last year that protects against this year..he doesn't need it anymore. But if he isn't lucky...well it doesn't end well for him. This partially destroys the argument.

(D) Each year the strain of influenza virus deemed most likely to be prevalent will be one that had not previously been deemed most likely to be prevalent.
This says....80% (most likely) chance, this year's flu will be different from last year's flu; 80% chance, next year's FLU will different from this year's flu.
In other words..there's a higher chance that every year we will have a different flu....THUS why we need vaccination every year.

(D) is relatively better than (C). But the tricky part is...when we negate (C), we all know it partially destroys the argument..and our mind wants THAT to be the answer. IT doesn't help that LSAT devils particularly used "No vaccine" - an extreme case or..LURE for negation. Well played LSAT, well played.

"To avoid serious cases of influenza, the author suggests that we annually immunize all high-risk individuals. However, each year’s vaccination will protect only against the strain of virus deemed most likely to be prevalent that year. On that basis, the author concludes that high-risk individuals will need to be immunized for a different strain every year.

The conclusion contains a logical gap, and a suitable prephrase is in order: what if the most prevalent strain never changes? If so, then there'd be no reason to receive a different vaccine every year. To prove the conclusion, we must establish that each year's most prevalent strain is different from the strain deemed most prevalent the year before. This prephrase agrees with answer choice (D).

Note, that despite the word "assumption" in the question stem, this is a Justify question, because the correct answer choice must allow the conclusion to be properly drawn. In other words, it must be sufficient to prove the conclusion.

Answer choice (A) is incorrect, because this would only affect the number of administered vaccines each year, not whether people need to be immunized for different strains every year.

Answer choice (B) is incorrect, because the likelihood of an epidemic has no bearing on the question of whether the vaccines need to be changed each year.

Answer choice (C) is attractive, but incorrect. If no vaccine protects against more than one strain, does that prove that we need to change the strains each year? Not unless we also assume that the most prevalent strain changes! If the most prevalent strain remains the same, we can keep using the same vaccine year after year, even if that vaccine protects against only one strain.

Answer choice (D) is the correct answer choice, as it agrees with our prephrase above.

Answer choice (E) is incorrect, because the question of side effects is extraneous to the argument."
(https://forum.powerscore.com/lsat/viewtopic.php?t=8658)

choice C is repeatation of evidence , a typical trap on cr gmat.

Here, conclusion is not :-

"Each year’s vaccination will protect only against the strain of the influenza virus deemed most likely to be prevalent that year, so every year it will be necessary for all high-risk individuals to receive a vaccine for a different strain of the virus."

But only - "so every year it will be necessary for all high-risk individuals to receive a vaccine for a different strain of the virus"

If you want to attack the conclusion. Only D will do the job.

plumber250 Please weigh on this.

Thanks!

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