RC Question 13 Explanation
DISCUSSION: As with questions 9, 10 and 12, you should justify your answer using the passage. There will almost always be a line that proves the right answer 100% correct for this type of question.
___________
- Lines 37-40 suggest that new computer storage systems may be more durable.
- Lines 58-59 suggest that it would be a good idea to sort through information and get rid of some dispensable material. So presumably we can predict what won’t be a great work.
- The general public doesn’t care about keeping stuff for that long, at least not compared to archivists. In any case, we have no idea whether the public are misled by manufacturers. This simply isn’t mentioned.
- The author implies that archivists have always wanted to keep only valuable information. The problem is greater in recent years simply because we have much more information and it degrades faster.
- CORRECT. Lines 46-54 imply this. Our view of the past is shaped by what survived. We would have a different view of history if Plato’s works had perished.
So future generations will have a different impression of our time depending on what we preserve today.
Hey Graeme, I posted this on 7sage, but I’d be interested to get your thoughts on my thought process here. I think it results from my feeling that to arrive at E with your explanation, you need to make a few jumps in logic that I don’t think are appropriate to make, or at the very minimum, would get you heavily penalized if you applied the same logic to other questions.
“A lot of these explanations are old and I noticed many of theme seem to use a lot of mental gymnastics to arrive at the answer which I’m always very opposed to. I think I found a way to arrive simply to the answer for question 13.
Looking at the wording of the question I think we’re left with totally ambiguous choices and I strongly think if we don’t modify how we look at the question we won’t arrive at the answer, as it’s been stated here, there is literally no explicit support from the author for E. Every single explanation I’ve seen uses mental gymnastics to get there and if you use that as a pattern for other questions you’re absolutely going to miss more than you gain.
If we change the wording to, which is most strongly supported by the passage, I think we can safely get to E. Essentially we’re turning this into an LR question where the stimulus is “Media is being lost and probably will continue to be lost. Even if there are technologies to stop this value judgements will need to be made as we won’t be able to archive everything in time before it degrades.”
With this in mind you can safely reach E as the answer. My only concern with this method is how adaptable it is to other ‘author holds x view questions'””
Hi! Not Graeme, but here are my thoughts.
One thing I think is important to emphasize is the wording “most strongly SUGGESTS”. That phrasing matters a lot. It’s not asking what the author explicitly states, but actually does call for identifying an implication that follows reasonably from the text (even if it’s not – and it usually won’t be, directly spelled out).
So while I agree that it’s good to avoid big inferential leaps or mental gymnastics, I don’t think that’s what’s happening with E. The author spends a good chunk of the final paragraph emphasizing that decisions about what to preserve must be made quickly, that those decisions should be value-based, and then ilustrates how similar choices in the past have shaped what texts survived and what didn’t (e.g. Homer vs. Plato). The clear implication is that today’s archivists are in a similar position: what they preserve (or don’t) will shape how the future understands the past. Which is exactly what E says.
I don’t think the phrasing is that different from an MSS question (if we’re thinking about it in an LR context). Most strongly suggests and most strongly supported are quite similar. I’d even go as far as to say RC, as in here, gives you more room for inferences than most LR questions often because there’s more context to work with. I’m curious of your interpretation though. How do you feel that switching the phrasing from “most strongly suggests” to “most strongly supported” helped justify the same inference?
And thanks for sharing your thoughts!
Question 13 answer E makes a strong statement like, “WILL INFLUENCE” HOW the future generation views and understands past. There is no way to prove it with the given passage. They key word here is “HOW.” There is no given information in the passage that would suggest anything related to HOW anyone would view or understand the past.
Not so. The passage says archivists will decide which works survive. Surviving works affect how future generations understand the past. If you somehow destroyed every book, that would certainly influence the future!
This is also a “most strongly suggests” question, so the answer doesn’t have to be airtight.
Note: This is an old comment but I wanted to clarify the point.
LOL. Thanks for the feedback. I think you misunderstood my conception of a value judgment; I was thinking of it the same way you are (i.e. some work that is “good” or “useful”) …what I’m saying is how can a judgment made super fast (as it would have to be if it’s virtually impossible to sort through) be informed as to how good something is subjectively? Anyway, I don’t really care about that as much as the below:
Still not convinced to be honest. :) The strategy regarding the LSAT would be a good one if you’re at the end of a section and have NO time. Might as well guess. Of course if you have the time, take the time you need to make the value judgment about what the right answer should be. But if I don’t have time, if I don’t guess, I have NO chance of getting any right ones (equivalent of the good stuff to be saved) if I don’t have enough time to even answer one correctly (sure I could skim stuff and try to pick the right answers but if I’m going to fast honestly I’ll probably get them all wrong or hardly get any right); if I do guess and there are, what, five questions or more left, it would be statistically in my favour to guess….at some point the closer these archivists get to when things will expire/be ruined, it should make sense to salvage as much as you can when it becomes impossible to make a judgment given the time constraints. I think some archivists would agree with me, in particular if there is such a huge volume of stuff and not much time. You didn’t address my library burning analogy and I still hold by that — probably as strongly as you’re holding by your LSAT one :). I think BOTH ANSWER CHOICES are stupid.
I took another look at this. The final sentence of the passage is referring to a hypothetical, future danger. It’s possible that in the future archivists won’t be able to sift effectively.
But E on questions 13 is talking about TODAY’s archivists. The bad stuff hasn’t happened yet. So archivists are still able to make judgments, and it’s well supported that archival judgments affect what’s availalble in the future and therefore the future’s perceptions of us.
I just think that the last sentence of the passage, in particular the phrase “virtually impossible for archivists to sort the essential from the dispensable in time to save it” indicates that the judgments the archivists will have to make WON’T be VALUE judgments. If they can’t even find the essential within all the pile of non-essential then how is that a value judgement?? That’s why I didn’t like E.
It’s also why I swung more toward B. If they can’t sort anything out, then logically to me it would make more sense to save as much as you can because sorting would take too much time according to the end of the passage that I quoted. Then later when there is more time since all that you saved is on more durable file types you could then have time to sort through as much as you can, and hopefully you would have saved some things of value.. To me it’s kind of like if a library is burning down and the librarian who would know the most important works isn’t there, you would save as many as you could… rather than sifting through the books while they’re about to burn up…
I suppose there is part of B though too that I don’t like but I like it more than what I thought about E. I see that the second clause “as there is no way to predict which piece of information will someday be considered a great work” isn’t that great of a phrase in terms of whether it’s there in the passage. But surely if it is possible to predict what information will be considered a great work, then the sorting should be easier than he says!?
The author admits that it’s not a danger that a masterpiece will be lost….so what are the essential works he’s talking about later in the sentence? I would think they could refer to ones that may become regarded as important later….i.e.ones that “will someday become considered a great work”….
Comments/thoughts???
A value judgement means a judgment made on subjective criteria. It’s not a judgment about the value of something.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_judgment
It’s not that archivists can’t sort anything out. It’s that they can’t sort EVERYTHING out and keep everything.
Consider the US national film registry. Most of the films preserved are pretty good. But there are surely some good films not preserved. E is saying that subjective judgments made today will affect how the future thinks about film from our time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Film_Registry
B is a stupid idea, and no archivist would agree with it. As the passage says, there’s not enough storage. It can be helpful to imagine an actual archivist when reading a passage like this. B is like saying “Well, I can’t be sure about LSAT answers, so I’ll just guess and try to guess as many as possible.” No LSAT student would ever agree to that, it’s a ridiculous idea.
Hey Mike,
(E) is saying that the decisions made by archivists about which works to save and which works to discard will affect the way people in the future will view the past.
The third paragraph makes the fact that this is the author’s opinion pretty clear. Graeme cites lines 46-54, but line 43 gives us a good indicator as well. The author tells us that “ideally” archivists will be able to make informed value judgments. He also states (in line 54) that there is a “danger” that archivists won’t have time to identify what is essential.
Because it’s clear that the author believes that archivists are responsible for determining what stays and what goes, it follows that their judgements will affect what documents and information will remain in the future, and this in turn will affect how future generations are able to understand the past.
Hope that helps!
Question 13 is BS. I don’t think it is inferred anywhere.