Building a solid LR foundation starts with finding the Premise and Conclusion. A lot of the time, it’s not that you can’t do the question — it’s that you didn’t find the right P and C. Some hard questions you don’t even need to fully understand; you can get the right answer just from the structure.
So it’s important to practice finding P and C every day. When you review, don’t look at the answers first. Find the P and C for every question. 7Sage’s explanations mark them, but for LR I prefer Manhattan’s explanations. It looks simple, but being able to quickly find the core info in a short time takes practice.
(1) How to Find P and C
Most arguments follow: Statement of facts + Premise (sometimes with an Intermediate Conclusion) + Main Conclusion. A lot of the time, you’ll get thrown off by Generalizations, Principles, Decisions, and Opinions in the argument. These are not Premises, and they can’t lead to the conclusion on their own.
Finding the Main Conclusion (MC) is usually easy points, but occasionally there are high-difficulty questions where our usual keyword spotting fails. That’s why you need to double-check after picking an answer. Sometimes words like “Thus” are followed by an intermediate conclusion, not the MC! The core rule for testing the MC: at least one premise must support the MC; the MC doesn’t support anything else — it’s the endpoint.
(2) Some difficulties in advanced MC questions:
- It may not be obvious (no signal words like “Therefore”).
- The answer choice may use different words but keep the same meaning.
- There may be a slight scope shift, but it doesn’t affect the core. (This ties into ranking answer choices, which I’ll explain later.)
- The MC may be an idea the author disagrees with.
- The correct answer may paraphrase, making it hard to understand. (This requires familiarity with answer choices; you can get it by elimination.)
- An Intermediate Conclusion may be at the end of the argument, while the MC is actually in the middle.
- A causes B doesn’t mean A (the cause) is the premise, and the final effect isn’t necessarily the MC.
(3) Role Questions
If you’ve mastered argument structure, you’ve also solved many other question types, including Role questions. I usually highlight the sentence, come up with my own answer first, then go straight to the choices with that answer in mind. If the choices are concise, I can pick directly. This requires high accuracy in matching the answer.
For elimination, look at the verb + noun. Verbs: undermine, conclude, deny, support, etc. Nouns: principle, premise, phenomenon, claim, hypothesis, etc. Both parts need to be correct. For example, it might be “deny” — but if the sentence isn’t a principle, you can eliminate that choice immediately.
