LSAT 102 | Section 2 | Logical Reasoning: Q7

LR Question 7 Explanation

QUESTION TEXT: Generations of European-history students have been…

QUESTION TYPE: Identify the Conclusion

CONCLUSION: The assassination that started the first world war was only the match that set a powder keg ablaze.

REASONING: There were many treaties and alliances at the time. Without these, an assassination could not have started a war.

ANALYSIS: On Main Point/Identify the Conclusion questions, ask yourself: why are they telling me this?

The point is, there were much deeper and more powerful forces that caused the war. The assassination was only the spark that set it all off.

Three of the wrong answers treat the war as inevitable. But the passage never said that the war would have inevitably happened without the war.

___________

1. This is a different argument. A chain of events would be: you spill some water, it hits a fuse box, the power goes off, someone in the house trips.
    
   The ultimate cause was: spilling the water.
2. This goes too far. Maybe there would have been a way to disentangle the alliances and avoid war.
3. CORRECT. This is it. The assassination set the war off, but it couldn’t have done so without the underlying structure of alliances.
4. The passage never talks about what could have happened without the assassination or whether the war could have been avoided.
5. The passage never says the war was inevitable. Maybe there would have been a way to avoid it.

Recap: The question begins with “Generations of European-history students have been”. It is a Identify The Conclusion question. Learn how to master LSAT Identify questions on the LSAT Logical Reasoning question types page.