LSAT 141 | Section 3 | Reading Comprehension: Q25

RC Question 25 Explanation

DISCUSSION: Read the whole third paragraph and you’ll see that the point is that voluntariness is not a useful concept when we’re deciding how much money to spend on safety.

So when the author says that voluntariness has “no special magic” he means that it’s not a concept we ought to attach any importance to.

I’m unusually insulting about the wrong answer choices below. They make me mad. They’re total nonsense designed to trick you. None of them make any sense or refer to anything mentioned in the passage.

___________

1. What? No. By definition, a risk is either voluntary, involuntary, or a bit of both. The two words do exhaustively categorize the risks we face. With this answer, the LSAC expected you to be confused about what the word “exhaustively” meant.
2. I think this answer is meant to play on the anti-government paranoia that has long been popular in the United States. The passage doesn’t talk about the government “concealing” anything. This is total nonsense.
3. What junk. The author never talked about the meaning of voluntary and involuntary. The point wasn’t whether voluntary has a “special meaning”. The question is: Is voluntariness a useful concept with which to make decisions?
4. Total rubbish. “Inform people’s understanding of the consequences of risk”….what the hell does this refer to? It wasn’t in the passage! The phrase I quoted means “how people decide how dangerous an activity is”. That simply isn’t discussed anywhere.
5. CORRECT. The third sentence of the first paragraph and the second sentence of the fourth paragraph support this. The point of the passage is that voluntariness is not a useful concept. So when the passage says that there is no special magic to voluntariness, the author means that we shouldn’t consider voluntariness as being particularly important.