PM on this one asking for me to take a look. I was about to say that this is an LSAT question - looks like it has been scanned in! Then I saw that Rishab let us know that it is from the LSAT.
One interesting note: This is question 25 which means this was either the last of the next to the LSAT question in an LSAT CR section (October of 1993 Test). Questions at the very end of LSAT CR sections are difficult, but what they really are is long.
This is a long question, but we can make sense of it using just two words.
The first word is "Yet." When you get a negation word like this is a strengthen or weaken question it is very helpful. The conclusion and the important evidence (which I call the Most Important Premise) both have to come AFTER the hard transition (or negation) word. The author's conclusion simply cannot come before this negation. You cannot say "In conclusion you should do this" and then come back with a "Yet" or "but' or "however." The sentences that come before this hard transition are a statement of the belief of the opposition and are about to be contradicted. So when you see this you know, what I just read was only written so that it can be contradicted.
So when I see the word "yet", I know I only need to have a general impression of what came before "yet." So in this case some people think that it is bad to wait for a peer review. It is not even really important as to why they think it is bad to wait for a peer review because the "yet" tells me we are going to find out that waiting for peer review is actually good. I also know that the Most Important Premise and the Conclusion both have to come after "yet."
You should be on the lookout for these hard transition words on the GMAT - they are very frequent throughout the CR section. When found in strengthen, weaken, assumption, bold faced reasoning and other similar questions that have a conclusion in the stimulus they function as described above, they tell you that the conclusion and main evidence do not come before that word. When found on a paradox question the hard transition usually separates the two sides of the paradox (very helpful)!
The second important word is "therefore" which signals the conclusion. So these two words have provided the structure of this stimulus. We have the opposition's argument before the "yet." We have the Most Important Premise between "yet" and "therefore" and we have the conclusion after the "therefore."
The conclusion is that waiting for a peer review is the price that must be paid to protect the public from relying on "possibly substandard research." The Most Important Premise is that peer review prior to publication is the only way to protect the public since the public is not equipped to evaluate medical claims.
This argument does something that is very tricky. Do you see the difference between the Most Important Premise and the Conclusion? The premise says that an article needs peer review before publication. The conclusion (and remember that every word of the conclusion is important) states "waiting until a medical journal has published the research findings that has passed peer review is the price that must be paid." Now do you see? The premise does not mention a medical journal only peer review in general. Very sneaky.
This makes "A" the correct assumption. Without this assumption, there is not the necessary connection between the need for a peer review stated as fact in the premise and the medical journal that is mentioned not in the premise but in the conclusion.
nice job by fitzgerald23.
As Rishab says, tougher than anything on the GMAT, but lots of lessons for us to learn for the GMAT!!
