LSAT 129 | Section 2 | Logical Reasoning: Q7

LR Question 7 Explanation

QUESTION TEXT: Essayist: Lessing contended that an art form’s medium

QUESTION TYPE: Sufficient Assumption

CONCLUSION: If imagists make poems, then Lessing is wrong that literature is events or actions in sequence.

REASONING: Imagist poems are merely amalgams of disparate images.

ANALYSIS: The question tells us that imagist poems are amalgams of disparate images. So what?

Lessing’s classification had one criterion: literature must be a sequence of events or actions. And the argument didn’t tell us that imagist poems fail to be events in sequence.

We can prove the argument right by showing that an amalgam of disparate images cannot be a sequence of events.

Normally I’d draw sufficient assumption questions, but I can’t easily think of how to fit this deduction into a diagram. It would be false of me to work on it for a few minutes, present a diagram to you, and pretend that you should have thought of it in timed conditions. Because I didn’t.

It’s not wrong to solve this question with a diagram, if you did. I’m just saying this question isn’t an obvious candidate for the type of question where a diagram will make you faster and more effective.

Note on vocabulary: This question has a hard word: amalgam. The LSAT is not a vocabulary test, so don’t let yourself get intimidated by hard words that aren’t structurally important. There are two strategies for dealing with these words:

Think of similar words. You may know “amalgamate” or “amalgamation”, which means joining together. Those words have the same root as “amalgam”: amalgam means something joined together too.

Ignore the words. You don’t need to know what “amalgam of disparate images” means. The question would have been the same if the sentence said “imagist poems are nothing but xjrty quomba blurt”. Then answer A would have said “An xjrty quomba blurt cannot represent a sequence of….”

Structural words like consequently, nonetheless, etc. matter and you need to learn those. But one-off words like amalgam and disparate are not important: they are placed there to intimidate you.

___________

1. CORRECT. If this is true, then imagist poems are literature but don’t fall into Lessing’s categorization.
   Amalgam → sequence of events → classification right
   The diagram just illustrates the flow of ideas. I didn’t use a diagram to solve this question: the logic doesn’t fit easily.
    
   (Technically we’re assuming the poems are literature: the conclusion said “If one regards as legitimate….”)
2. The argument is asking what happens if we assume the imagist poems are legitimate. It’s useless to know what makes poems illegitimate, because we’re not talking about illegitimate poems!
3. It doesn’t matter if Lessing knew about imagist poems. Her principle was supposed to apply to all poems. If an example you didn’t know about contradicts your principle, then your principle is wrong.
4. Merely depicting subject matter doesn’t matter. Lessing’s principle said that poems must have a sequence. That’s the only thing relevant for us to consider.
5. So? This is just a random general statement about art. We only care about imagist poems and whether they show events in succession.
   The word simultaneous in the stimulus was only relevant to painting, not to literature. This answer is an example of the LSAT randomly combining two unrelated terms in a useless way.