LSAT 138 | Section 4 | Logical Reasoning: Q11

LR Question 11 Explanation

QUESTION TEXT: Most universities today offer students a more in-depth…

QUESTION TYPE: Strengthen

CONCLUSION: University education is now more in depth and cosmopolitan.

REASONING: Currently, most university history courses now assign textbooks that mention modern Asia and Africa, and mention the history of America’s indigenous cultures.

ANALYSIS: This argument mixes two terms:

1. The cosmopolitanism of University education, overall.
2. Whether history courses are somewhat more cosmopolitan in their required readings.

So this argument looks at specific courses, and uses them to draw a conclusion about universities overall. This isn’t a good argument: maybe political science courses got less cosmopolitan. Or maybe fewer people take history. Who knows?

To strengthen the argument, we should show that the changes in history textbooks are representative.

___________

1. “Most interesting” is a trap on many questions. Here, we’re looking for the average university experience, whereas “most interesting” refers to 0.1% of courses.
2. “All periods and world cultures” is much broader than what the stimulus discussed. So this could refer to a very small percentage of universities. And this only refers to “many students”. So this answer could be utterly unrepresentative of the average university experience.
3. CORRECT. This answer says that the trend in university history textbooks is representative of overall university cosmopolitanism. 
4. This weakens the argument. We’re trying to strengthen it.
5. This tells us basically nothing. It’s making a one sided comparison. Do students in a history course which covers multiple cultures get a cosmopolitan education from that course alone? Doubtful. So this answer fails to make a useful distinction.