LSAT 143 | Section 4 | Logical Reasoning: Q5

LR Question 5 Explanation

QUESTION TEXT: Many scholars are puzzled about who created the…

QUESTION TYPE: Most Strongly Supported

FACTS:

1. We don’t know who did the abridgment of Hamlet found in the First Quarto.
2. We know that the author didn’t have a copy of Shakespeare’s play.
3. The author’s description of one character’s speeches was very accurate. The rest wasn’t.

ANALYSIS: Increasingly, LSAT questions are asking you to use your common sense and intuition. To answer this question, put yourself in the shoes of the author of the abridgment.

What sort of person would know one character well, but only sort-of know the rest of the play? An actor.

You can and must use this sort of outside knowledge to predict the answer to questions. Anyone taking the LSAT knows what a play is and agrees that actors know their own parts best, so this kind of reasoning can help predict answers.

___________

1. This is highly unlikely. Shakespeare wrote the play, so he likely would have kept a copy. It’s also odd that Shakespeare would know one character better than the others.
2. The abridgment was “slipshod.” That’s not a good basis for producing a play on stage.
3. CORRECT. This makes sense. Actors know their own parts best. They’ll have them memorized even if they don’t have a copy of the play.
4. A spectator would be unlikely to have memorized one character’s speeches after a single viewing.
5. Unlikely. If an actor was trying to improve the play they would have worked from an actual copy. It would be almost impossible to improve a play if you were only working from memory, with no copy of your own.