LSAT 138 | Section 4 | Logical Reasoning: Q20

LR Question 20 Explanation

QUESTION TEXT: Historian: Radio drama requires its listeners to think…

QUESTION TYPE: Necessary Assumption

CONCLUSION: Today’s generation (TV viewers) don’t exercise their imaginations as much as previous generations (radio listeners) did.

REASONING: The author mentions that radio required imagination by requiring visualization. (As a common sense assumption we know that TV doesn’t require visualization.)

ANALYSIS: This argument missed two possibilities:

• TV doesn’t require visualization, but it still requires imagination in some others ways (e.g. imagining what might happen next.)
• The TV generation is exposed to other things that require imagination. (TV and radio aren’t the only possibly sources of stimulation.)

___________

1. This doesn’t matter. If people spend less time watching TV, they aren’t necessarily filling in the extra time with activities that require imagination.
2. This is irrelevant. The author never mentioned familiarity as a factor.
3. The author wasn’t saying which forms of entertainment were desirable. They were just making a factual claim about the effect entertainment had on imagination.
4. CORRECT. This works. The conclusion was about whether the generation requires imagination. It wasn’t strictly about TV.
   Negation: Internet usage requires imagination and fills the gap left by radio as a means for exercising the imagination.
   (I’ve negated this to “internet”, but it could be anything. There are multiple ways to make a statement false.)
5. This is a trap answer. The question isn’t whether TV drama makes you think. It’s whether it makes you think as much as radio did.