LSAT 151 | Section 3 | Logical Reasoning: Q16

LR Question 16 Explanation

QUESTION TEXT: Wood that is waterlogged or desiccated can be preserved …

QUESTION TYPE: Most Strongly Supported

FACTS:

• Wood usually disintegrates within 100–200 years, unless unusually preserved.
• Because of this, few remains of early wheeled vehicles survive.
• Archaeologists have found small ceramic models of those vehicles from the same period.
• These models survive much better than the real vehicles.
• As a result, most evidence about early wheeled vehicles comes from the models.

ANALYSIS: The stimulus contrasts wooden vehicles, which usually disintegrated, with ceramic models, which survived and therefore provide most of our evidence.

The important idea is that the evidence we have is ceramic because the actual vehicles were generally made from something much less durable.

So a supported inference will likely concern what those vanished vehicles were probably made of, since that is what explains why the ceramic models, rather than the vehicles themselves, are our main evidence.

___________

1. Nothing in the stimulus tells us who made the models.
2. The stimulus says archaeologists found ceramic models and that these provide the main evidence. It does not justify inferring few wooden models were made; many could have been made and simply disintegrated.
3. We’re concerned with actual preservation, not whether the makers knew of it.
4. This is the opposite of what the stimulus suggests. Those conditions help preserve wood and normal conditions disintegrate it. And, we don’t know anything about actually finding them.
5. CORRECT. Since wood usually disintegrates and archaeologists have found few actual vehicles for that reason, while ceramic survives well, the passage supports that many of the lost vehicles were wooden rather than made of ceramic-like durable materials.