RC Question 25 Explanation, by LSATHacks
QUESTION TEXT: The author of the passage attributes the belief…
DISCUSSION: This question is asking for the reason people falsely think that glass flows. Lines 1-4 show that glass experts didn’t have this false believe. So it is regular people who have this false belief.
So the right answer probably won’t be too technical. There has to be something in there that regular people could form a misunderstanding about.
Also, only paragraph 1 talks about people’s beliefs. That means the support must come from that paragraph. Any answer mentioning medieval glass or glass manufacturing, for example, is wrong because the author never told us what people think about those things.
Incidentally, I spent an incredible amount of time trying to explain this question. I couldn’t for the life of me see how the right answer was supported by the passage.
Turns out I misread the question. I thought it said “which of the following explains why the myth occurred?”. But actually it’s asking which false assumption people believed about glass. (I got this right timed, then read it wrong when writing the explanation.)
Why am I boring you with this information? Because if it can happen to me, it can happen to you. If you’re totally stuck on question, moving through the answers slowly one by one, you’ve done something wrong. Take a few deep breaths, and reread the question. If it still doesn’t make sense, move on and come back later at the end of the passage if you have time.
___________
- It’s highly unlikely that regular people would create a myth because they thought glass was crystalline rather than amorphous.
In any case, crystals don’t flow. So if people believed this answer then they would also think that glass does not flow.
(Line 17 shows that molten glass has an amorphous structure. That’s what lets it flow!) - CORRECT. I found this easy to choose from intuition, but hard to explicitly justify with the passage text. Bear with me.
Lines 8-10 show that the persistent belief probably came from a misunderstanding about glasses’s structure. People correctly understand that glass isn’t a crystal structure. However, they misunderstand what this means. Line 4 show that glass’ lack of crystal structure makes people think it flows downward like a viscous liquid.
However, this is wrong. Lines 17-19 show that cooled glass behaves as a solid, even though it has an amorphous structure.
Phew. I don’t think you needed to have all those citations to get this question right. My prephrase of this question in timed conditions was “something something people think glass structure flows, but that’s wrong”
And that worked. It’s very helpful to go through all these citations on review, as it will help your timed work. But don’t think you need to know all this in real time. It took me 5-10 minutes to write the explanation for this question. - Only paragraph 1 talks about people’s beliefs. We’re never told what people think about medieval glass or glass manufacturing methods.
- The passage doesn’t mention people’s beliefs about transition temperatures, or about medieval glass. For people to have a misapprehension about something, we need to know what they think of it.
- This was a trap answer. It gets things backwards. It says people think that liquid and solid glass are thermodynamically dissimilar.
But actually, people mistakenly believe that liquid and solid glass are thermodynamically similar. That’s why they think solid glass flows downwards: they believe it behaves like a liquid.
The full error in lines 10-14 is this: People see that liquid and solid glass are structurally similar, so they mistakenly think that liquid and solid glass are thermodynamically similar.
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Found this really hard. CDE were all garbage. But I chose A over B.
The question mentions common people’s misunderstanding (that glass flows or behaves like liquid) stems partly from the crystal structure. ‘confusion comes from misunderstanding of atoms in glass not arranged in a fixed crystal structure’. To me this seemed to say they had confusing over whether the structure was crystal. I understood the passage told us that the structure wasn’t actually crystal – but if people are confused about whether it’s in a crystal structure that seems to imply they wrongfully believe it is in a crystal structure. The passage is using this confusion to explain why people wrongfully believe there is flow.
This really confused me. I kind of understood this to mean that people were confused about the crystal status of glass (because if they understand it’s not crystal they aren’t confused they’re in agreement with scientists) and that this somehow led to a belief that glass flows… and I said well that makes no damn sense, but it’s the common’s people belief about glass structure so I’m not sure I have to assume it would be at all accurate. Maybe people don’t commonly understand the properties of a crystal structure.
Moving on to B we immediately need “amorphous”. The word amorphous doesn’t strike me as some part of any commonly held belief by normal people. So in desperation I turned to the first paragraph and read it five times. And each of those times resulted in the same highlighted text… the only thing I felt I had to go on. Which was that people were confused about both crystal status and thought glass flowed.
I know you already rewrote this a few times. Any further tips here? I spent 6 minutes! on 24-25 under timed conditions and got them both wrong (I only went -3 on section and it was 24, 25, 27). 24 finally makes sense to me and 27 I caught on reread. But 25 still has me lost af.
Good question. So, people weren’t confused about the crystal or non-crystal status of glass. It is a FACT that glass is non-crystal. The confusion is over what this means. People misunderstand the fact –> as in they misunderstand what the fact implies.
You can see this if you look at the start of the paragraph. People have a mythical belief that glass flows like a liquid. So they think “Glass is not a crystal –> Therefore it is a liquid”. Sentences have to be read in the context of the entire surrounding passage, not just in isolation.
Amorphous comes from the same thing. Amorphous means without a defined shape or form. i.e. a crystal is morphous, and liquid is amorphous. People think: Glass –> not crystal –> amorphous –> must be like a liquid
Hope that helps! It is a tough passage and a tough question.
Note: This is an old comment but I wanted to clarify the point.