LSAT 113 | Section 3 | Logical Reasoning: Q20

LR Question 20 Explanation

QUESTION TEXT: One of the most vexing problems in historiography…

QUESTION TYPE: Most Strongly Supported

FACTS:

1. The usual historical sources often offer conflicting chronologies for an event.
2. When this happens historians should attempt to minimize the number of sources and eliminate the less credible. 
3. When there are still several left the historians may try to determine the chronology independent of the usual sources. Sometimes this still doesn’t work.

ANALYSIS: There’s never much to say about most strongly supported questions. If you understand the statements given in the stimulus then they are usually pretty straightforward.

We don’t know how often chronologies conflict. We don’t know how troublesome this process is. We don’t know how often this process works except that it sometimes does fail.

___________

1. This is possible, but it doesn’t have to be true. It could be that the situations described in the stimulus are rare.
2. CORRECT. We know that sometimes even the third step fails. 
3. We only know this is true for some events. It may not be true for every event. For instance, everyone agrees that the 2008 presidential election happened. We don’t have to reconcile many different chronologies. 
4. Not necessary. Maybe this method works most of the time. 
5. No. We should only eliminate the sources that are least credible. We want to keep the credible ones.