RC Passage 3 Explanation
This is an explanation for passage 3 of LSAT preptest 31, the June 2000 LSAT. This passage is about feminist primatology. It discusses Haraway’s book Primate Visions.
This section has paragraph summaries and an analysis of the passage, links to the explanations for the questions are below.
Paragraph Summaries
- Primate Visions is a feminist science history book. It questions our unconscious assumptions.
- Haraway attacks the knower/object relation (e.g. a scientist observing a gorilla). There is no single reality.
- Haraway doesn’t have a single story. This fragmented history is normal in historiography but unusual in science.
- Haraway ignores the traditional difference between topics inside and outside science.
Analysis
Many people find this passage confusing and meaningless. We’ve all seen academic gibberish that uses buzzwords and that has no meaning.
But this is the LSAT. They don’t write meaningless things. This passage talks about real things, and every point it makes has a definite meaning. It’s just a bit different from what we’re used to, so it takes some effort to figure out what it all means.
If you don’t understand something, don’t skip it and move on! There is always a way to get something from context. For example, look at line 37…many people think “what is historiography!?”.
You don’t need to know. Historiography is what Haraway does, that’s all you must know. Haraway writes in a scattered way that’s normal in historiography (whatever that is) but unusual in science. That’s what you need to understand.
Most of the questions can be answered using a line from the passage. Since this is a difficult passage, they’ve made the questions more direct. You don’t have to make inferences.
The answer choices are intended to confuse, by referring to things that were in the passage, but in the wrong context. You need to know what you’re looking for, and use lines from the passage to support your answers. Otherwise, it’s easy to get lost on this passage.
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