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LSAT resolve the paradox questions present two facts that seem incompatible and ask what would let both be true. Recognize them from resolve the discrepancy or explain the apparent conflict. Solve them by stating both facts precisely, because the resolution always hides in a term you read too quickly.
Recognition is the cheapest point on the section. Every resolve the paradox question announces itself in the stem, and the stems recycle a small number of formulations. Learn them and you stop spending seconds deciding what you are being asked.
Stem wordingWhat it tells youWhich one of the following, if true, most helps to resolve the apparent discrepancy described above?The canonical stem.Which one of the following, if true, would most help to explain the situation described above?Explain rather than resolve, same task.Which one of the following, if true, most helps to reconcile the two findings above?Reconcile, same task.Each of the following, if true, helps to resolve the apparent paradox EXCEPTThe except form. Four choices resolve it and you are hunting the one that does not.
Read the stem before the stimulus. Knowing you are hunting apparent conflict changes what you notice on the first read, and reading the stimulus cold means reading it twice.
Three steps, in this order. The order is the method, because the most common way to lose this question type is to read the answer choices before you have decided what you are looking for.
StepWhat it means in practiceWrite both halves down as separate sentencesFact one and fact two, in your own words. The paradox is almost always powered by a quantity that changed and a different quantity that did not, and separating the sentences is what makes the mismatch visible.Look for the term doing double dutyNumber versus rate, total versus per-person, revenue versus profit, reported versus occurred. Most paradoxes on this test are built from a pair like these, and finding the pair usually solves the question before you read the choices.Demand that the answer preserve both factsA choice that explains one fact by denying the other has not resolved anything. The correct answer leaves both statements standing and shows why they were never in conflict.
The stimulus and answer choices below were written for this page. They are not taken, adapted or paraphrased from any real LSAT question, because reproducing licensed test content is not something we do. The style is the target; the content is ours.
Stimulus.
Since the Brightwater Aquarium began charging for parking, the number of cars in its car park has fallen by roughly a third. Yet in each of those months the aquarium's total attendance has been higher than in the same month a year earlier.
Question. Which one of the following, if true, most helps to resolve the apparent discrepancy described above?
(A) In the same month that parking charges began, the aquarium opened a free shuttle from the city transit station, and a growing majority of visitors now arrive on it
(B) The aquarium raised its admission price at the same time that parking charges began
(C) Attendance at other aquariums in the region declined over the same period
(D) The aquarium's car park was rarely close to full before the parking charges began
(E) Most visitors who still drive to the aquarium now arrive before midday
The answer is (A).
Fact one is about cars. Fact two is about people.
Those only conflict if driving is how visitors arrive, and choice A severs exactly that link by supplying another way in that started at the same moment. Both facts stay true and the tension disappears, which is what resolution means here.
Reviewing the four wrong answers is worth more than confirming the right one. Each was engineered to catch a specific misreading, and naming that misreading is what stops it recurring.
ChoiceWhy it failsBDeepens the puzzle rather than resolving it. Higher admission prices alongside paid parking make rising attendance harder to explain, not easier.CRegional comparison tells you Brightwater is doing well relative to peers. It does nothing to explain how more people arrived in fewer cars.DExplains why the car park never overflowed. The question is why car numbers fell while attendance rose, which this leaves untouched.ERedistributes the same drivers across the day. Timing has no bearing on the count of cars or the count of visitors.
Across resolve the paradox questions, the wrong answers fall into recurring shapes. Once you can name the shape you can eliminate on sight instead of arguing with each choice on its merits.
TrapHow it worksThe deepenerAdds a fact that makes the conflict worse. Reliably attractive because it is clearly relevant.The one-sided explanationAccounts for one fact while implicitly contradicting the other.The irrelevant comparisonIntroduces a benchmark, a competitor or an industry trend that never touches the mechanism.The restatementSays the same puzzling thing in different words and feels like insight because it is familiar.
One question people always ask about resolve the paradox questions is how many appear per test. There is no honest answer to give. LSAC does not publish how many questions of each type appear on a given test, and no honest page can give you a percentage without inventing it.
What is published is the scored structure: the LSAT is two scored Logical Reasoning sections and one scored Reading Comprehension section, four 35-minute sections in total including one unscored variable section, with a 10-minute intermission after section two, per LSAC's own test specifications (https://www.lsac.org/lsat/register-lsat/accommodations/specifications-lsat-and-lsat-argumentative-writing). Two of the three scored sections are Logical Reasoning, so LR carries roughly two thirds of your scored questions.
That ratio is worth planning around. A per-type count is not, because nobody outside LSAC has one.
That matters practically, because study plans built on invented percentages allocate your weeks wrong. If you read that resolve the paradox questions are eleven percent of the test, ask where the number came from. It came from somebody counting a handful of released tests and rounding, which is not the same thing as a published specification.
Plan on the structure instead. Two of your three scored sections are Logical Reasoning, resolve the paradox questions appear in both, and no single LR type is rare enough to skip or common enough to carry your score by itself.
Drilling resolve the paradox questions in a block is efficient for learning the pattern and misleading about whether you have learned it. Blocked practice lets you know the question type before you read the stimulus, which is exactly the cue the real test removes.
The size of that gap is measured. In a classroom study of 787 students across 54 classrooms, interleaved practice produced 61 percent correct against 38 percent for blocked practice at a 33-day delay, an effect of d = 0.83, per Rohrer, Dedrick and Hartwig (2019), Journal of Educational Psychology (https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/spaced-repetition/2019-rohrer.pdf). Blocked practice felt better and tested worse.
The same reversal shows up in how students judge their own learning. Kornell and Bjork (2008), Psychological Science (https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/spaced-repetition/2008-kornell.pdf) found 78 percent of students judged massed study as good as or better than spaced study while 78 percent actually performed better spaced. Your sense that a drill block is working is not evidence that it is.
So use blocks to build the recognition, then stop. Once you can name a resolve the paradox question from the stem without thinking, the questions belong back in mixed sets where you have to identify the type yourself, because identifying it is half the skill.
Review is where the points are, and review is not reading the explanation for the answer you missed. The intervention research is blunt about this: across 28 studies and more than 16,000 participants, test prep as a category produced an overall effect of g = .26, and practice tests on their own produced g = .19 at p = .233, which is not statistically significant, per Hao and colleagues (2025), Review of Educational Research (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.3102/00346543251360775). Taking questions is not the active ingredient.
What did work in that same Hao and colleagues analysis was structured practice on the reasoning: workbooks at g = .40 and explicitly teaching test-taking skills at g = .35. And there was no dose response at all, with neither contact hours at p = .489 nor program length in weeks at p = .314 predicting outcomes.
More hours is not the lever. Better review is.
Concretely, for every resolve the paradox question you get wrong, write three lines before you look at any explanation: what you thought the apparent conflict was, what it actually was, and the exact word in the stimulus that would have told you. The third line is the one that transfers.
Then leave the question alone for at least a day before you revisit it. Testing yourself beats restudying at g = 0.50 across 61 studies, the advantage rises to g = 0.69 when the delay is a day or more against g = 0.41 under a day, and feedback roughly doubles the effect at g = 0.73 with against g = 0.39 without, per Rowland (2014), Psychological Bulletin (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25150680/).
Every LSAC figure on this page was taken from LSAC's own pages and last checked on July 26, 2026. Prices, dates and policies move without notice, so the source link sits next to each number rather than in a bibliography at the bottom.
Where LSAC has not published something, this page says so in those words rather than filling the hole with a plausible number. That is the difference between a gap and a guess, and only one of them is safe to plan around.
Resolve, explain, or reconcile paired with discrepancy, paradox, conflict or situation. There is no conclusion to attack, which is the structural tell.
Write both facts as separate sentences, hunt for a term doing double duty such as number against rate, and require the answer to leave both facts intact.
LSAC does not publish per-type counts. The published structure is two scored Logical Reasoning sections out of three scored sections, per LSAC's own specifications.
Usually not. They are two facts in tension, which is why looking for a conclusion wastes time and why weaken and strengthen instincts misfire here.
Four choices will resolve the paradox and one will not. Work positively, marking each choice that genuinely resolves it, and the odd one out is your answer.
Written by Ali, Georgetown Law, founder of Lovare Institut.
August 5, 2026
August 5, 2026