LSAT 128 | Section 3 | Logical Reasoning: Q21

LR Question 21 Explanation

QUESTION TEXT: Musicologist: Ludwig van Beethoven began losing his hearing …

QUESTION TYPE: Most Strongly Supported

CONCLUSION: Beethoven’s hearing loss gave his later music a great introspective quality.

REASONING:

1. He began losing his hearing at age 30, and it gradually worsened until he became completely deaf.
2. His later music had an introspective quality that was not present in his earlier music.

ANALYSIS: It’s hard to predict MSS answers because they can address virtually any part of the stimulus. Here’s a couple things we do and don’t know to have a good grasp on:

• There’s no claim on whether the later music is better or worse. Just more introspective (which is described as a good thing, but we don’t know that it makes his later music better).
• His hearing loss influenced this introspective quality.
• The musicologist also never said that his hearing loss was the only reason for this change.

___________

1. The argument doesn’t explicitly address the difficulty of composing, but it does hint at it. The most we can infer is that the author doesn’t seem to think the hearing loss hindered Beethoven’s quality. But we don’t know whether it was more difficult for him to compose before vs. after.
2. This is making a claim of which music was better, but that’s not what the musicologist says. They just argued that hearing loss influenced an introspective quality that wasn’t present before.
3. The musicologist suggests that his hearing loss made his music more introspective, not himself in general. We don’t know anything about his introspection outside his music.
4. The musicologist specifically attributes this introspection to his hearing loss, not age.
5. CORRECT. This might seem general, but it is supported. Since the argument links his hearing loss to the introspective quality of his later music, it follows that if he had not lost his hearing, his later music would probably have been different.