LSAT Question Explanation
PT 108, Section 3, Question 3
ParadoxExplanation
The odd phenomenon here is that one might expect professionals to be generally better photographers than amateurs, but amateurs won most of the prizes.
A few explanations that come to mind: maybe some of the prizes were reserved for amateurs, or maybe many more of the photos entered came from amateurs rather than professionals.
Answer choices
Many more entries being from amateurs definitely could explain why most of the prizes went to amateurs. It's just statistically more likely.
This bias in the judging would help explain why amateur photos won more prizes.
This could explain why amateurs won more because while professionals may have work that's just as good if not better, the professionals weren't entering their best pieces to the competition.
This explains why amateurs won more, because professionals were excluded from competing for many of the prizes.
While this may seem tempting, it actually doesn't address how amateurs could have won more than professionals. This is the classic LSAT trap where the stimulus makes a comparison and then a trap answer only addresses one side of the comparison. This answer choice doesn't tell us how many amateur photos are in the competition compared to professional photos. Despite the increase here in amateurs in the competition, there could still be way more professionals, so this doesn't explain at all why amateurs won more of the prizes..