Main Conclusion | LSAT Logical Reasoning 

Thank you Arushita, you rock!

No rules are universal on the LSAT. While words like "clearly" and "should" can help you find a conclusion, there's another grammatical structure at play here. The ", and" indicates that the last two claims work in cooperation with each other. That helps you rule out both parts of the second sentence from being the conclusion.

No, that's too strongly worded, unfortunately. Most things on LSAT are tendencies but not absolutes. You can use a PIVOT word to go into your premise or your conclusion. It's definitely used much more often to go into a conclusion, but you don't want to equate "But / yet / however" with "Conclusion Indicator". Here, it goes into the conclusion: A lot of people think that pizza is kids' favorite food. But they're wrong. Many pizzas are too saucy for picky kids, whereas any store bought mac-n-cheese box will go over without complaint. Here, it goes into a premise: A lot of people think that pizza is kids' favorite food. But many pizzas are too saucy for picky kids, whereas mac-n-cheese always satisfies. Thus, they're wrong.

Answer (B) is most similar to the very last sentence of the argument. We've identified the second to last sentence as the conclusion and the last sentence as the premise. We were able to identify them as such based on the pattern of rebuttals (i.e., refutation of an opposing point). We could also say that answer choice (B) isn't even something stated in the argument. Nowhere does it say that early discussions were about factors other than global warming that affect the frequency and intensity of storms. Answer (D) is wrong for similar reasons. First, it's a paraphrase of the last sentence, when the conclusion is the second to last sentence. Second, the paraphrase is a bit problematic. The argument refers to factors, such as instabilities in wind flow, but that makes room for other factors that this answer does not include. Also, this answer says "negate" when the argument says "counteract." The LSAT likes to have multiple reasons to point to when identifying the incorrectness. This means if you don't see a reason why an answer is wrong, just focus on another difference between the answers and you'll likely have better luck.

@@LSATLab Thank you!