LSAT 77, Reading Comprehension, Q19

RC Question 19 Explanation

QUESTION TEXT: The author of passage A would be most likely to…

DISCUSSION: The author thinks two main things about gender analysis:

• It’s useful, to some extent. It has explanatory power (see lines 17-18).
• It’s perhaps bad that gender analysis has replaced the study of individual women. See lines 27-32.

___________

1. Nonsense. Passage B is an example of gender analysis. Gender analysis is mainstream because women’s history was integrated into history. So passage B is the opposite of this answer; it’s a apparently mainstream historical analysis which uses gender analysis.
2. The author of passage A wouldn’t think this. More likely, they would want to know about how the lives of individual Roman women changed due to Augustus’ laws.
3. The point of passage A is that historical analysis is turning away from “women” and towards “gender”. So passage A doesn’t discuss a trend towards analyzing the political influence of women.
4. This is unlikely. In the final paragraph of passage A we see that the author is skeptical of the focus placed on the study of gender. So it’s unlikely that they would argue that “much recent historical scholarship….fails to recognize….gender”. If anything they think there’s too much gender studies in history.
5. CORRECT. This works. You might have hesitated because this answer speaks positively of gender analysis, and the author of passage A was hesitant.
   But the author of passage A wasn’t categorically opposed to gender analysis. While they thought it had unduly replaced women’s studies, they also thought it had some good elements; see lines 17-18. Passage B is indeed a good example of the explanatory power of gender.

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