LSAT 113 | Section 1 | Reading Comprehension: Q23

RC Question 23 Explanation

DISCUSSION: The question makes us think about how people weigh risk. And it introduces the research results that follow: people need a very big payoff to take a risk.

If you have a 50% chance to lose $100, and a 50% chance to gain $201, you should take that bet. But most people hesitate. They need things to be very lopsided in their favor before taking risks.

___________

1. Lines 32-35 suggest that people tend to react the same way to risk.
2. It’s not a rhetorical question: the author has an answer for us. Rhetorical questions tend to be unanswerable.
3. CORRECT. The previous view was that people need a big payoff before they’ll take a risk. Lines 33-35 answer the question from lines 24-27 and suggest that people often do behave as the old theory predicted. 
4. In plain English, this means that how we see things (subjective) is the same as how they actually are (objective). But the experimental results in lines 33-35 show the opposite. People turn down good bets because they fear risk.
5. This sentence is confusing, because it describes something that never happens. The easiest way to eliminate it is to focus on one small part you can disprove. Was there ever any ‘previously unaccepted research’ mentioned? No? Then this answer can’t be right.