RC Question 22 Explanation, by LSATHacks
QUESTION TEXT: The passage most helps to answer which one of…
DISCUSSION: On this type of question, the right answer will be something that you can literally point to in the passage. If you can’t do that, you’re guessing.
The wrong answers take terms from the passage, but terms that were just mentioned as asides. There is no information in the passage that will answer the questions in the wrong answers.
Familiar terms feel more “right” to the brain. This is a known psychological bias. Know that you should move through answers rapidly if you’re only considering them because a term feels familiar. Either find the term in the passage to prove the answer, or move on.
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- Lines 46-49 show that the passage lumps all pre-19th century glass blowing into the same category. The author didn’t differentiate between 17th century and medieval techniques.
- CORRECT. The fourth paragraph covers this. One way that modern techniques differ is that modern window glass is made by floating liquid glass on molten tin (lines 55-56).
- The passage never mentions pre-medieval windows.
- The passage only mentions germanium oxide once, on lines 32-35. It’s given as an example of the fastest flowing glass. The author never says whether it’s used in churches.
The point of mentioning it was to show that even the fastest flowing glass is incredibly slow. - Lines 35-36 say that there were impurities in medieval glass, but the passage doesn’t say how they got there.
I used the same logic as Tskel to eliminate B, but I can see why it could be right. My bigger problem is with eliminating E. In lines 49-50, the author describes the impurities (ripples and thickened edges) and how they came to be (whirling the disk). We are taught to make connections between paragraphs and I fail to see how these lines are not describing the impurities mentioned in line 35.
These ripples and thickened edges are actually a consequence of impurities, rather than the impurities themselves. So, even though we have a sense of how these consequences came to be, we still don’t know how the impurities themselves came to be.
Paragraph 4 says “until the 19th century…” which led me to conclude that beginning in the 19th century and on…
thus lumping together “19th century” and “today” and causing me to eliminate choice B. Still don’t get why that’s wrong :/ So if you pick some time in the 19th century where the new methods had already been developed, they may not differ from the methods of today.
I chose E because I thought “impurity” could refer to uneven thickness in the glass. I mean, unevenness is a form of impurity, right? I guess that was a stretch
That’s a good question, but reading “until in the nineteenth century” in that way would imply that exactly at the start of 1800, the glass manufacturing methods shifted. We can make the common sense assumption that at some point during the 1800’s, the glass manufacturing methods shifted. So, at some point in the 1800’s, the windowpane manufacturing technique of blowing molten glass into a large globe was used. And that technique differs from the technique used most often today.
As for (E), yes, I agree that’s a bit of a stretch. The passage also clearly uses “impurities” and “uneven thickness” to mean different things. Impurities in medieval stained glass are mentioned in lines 35-39, but we’re not given any information about what produced them.
But we don’t live in the 19th or even 20th century? What’s to stop there from being an unmentioned technique used in the 19th century and the one in the passage used in the 20th century?
Hi Ryan, apologies for the late response, but I still wanted to address your question.
The passage explains that prior to the 19th century, glass was blown and flattened into disks, creating uneven thickness. It then states that in the 19th century (as Lucas states, we can interpret this to mean sometime in the 1800s), glass was drawn into sheets using rods, producing more uniform panes. Finally, it mentions that TODAY, glass is made using the float method, which ensures extreme flatness. This progression is sufficient to answer B: the 19th-century technique (rod-drawing) differs from the modern float method.
While unmentioned methods could exist, I’m not entirely sure what impact you’re implying this would have. We are asked to answer this question based on what the passage tells us. We know that they used rod-drawing then, and the float method today.