RC Question 7 Explanation, by LSATHacks
QUESTION TEXT: Which one of the following statements, if true…
DISCUSSION: Remember, a “national black theater” has two components:
- It’s produced across the country.
- It’s by African-Americans, for African-Americans, and represents African-American ideas.
___________
- This weakens the claim, because it shows there were already black plays performed by black actors, before the Negro units.
- This sounds good, but there could have been a national black theater even if there wasn’t government funding. Government funding for the arts is a comparatively recent phenomenon; yet theater existed before funding was widespread.
- CORRECT. If African-American plays were only in large eastern cities, then they weren’t national, by definition. Whereas the Negro Units performed in cities all over the US. (line 14)
- This suggests that the audiences at Negro Unit productions were larger than what came before. If you math out the numbers in the passage you get an average of 386 people per show if each FTP produced one show per day. However, the question is about a truly national theatre, and that implies broad geographic representation. C describes this better.
- This just makes it hard to judge the claim. A truly national black theatre might have existed even if we can’t find records for it. A lot of history is surprisingly poorly documented. Lack of knowledge doesn’t equal lack of theater.
Hi, I'm Graeme Blake
Founder of LSAThacks; I scored a 177 on the LSAT.
I created the LSAT Mastery Seminars, which are part of the Ultimate LSAT Prep Bundle
If you like the explanations you're reading I'm 100% confident you'll enjoy the courses. Satisfaction guaranteed.
---------
Updates:
For updates, sign up for my email list. I update whenever I have new posts.
100 people is definitely not a typical audience for plays in the 1920s. It’s very very small. Especially when the passage provided explicitly mentions play numbers for the FTP approaching the millions.
Hmm you raise a good point. 500,000/7/185 = 386 people per show if you assume one show per day per unit. I guess the actual reason is that a truly national theatre is about a geographic presence across the nation, rather than raw numbers, and C captures this better. Nice catch, I’ll update the explanation!
I thought D was stronger than C because of line 4 “entertained a weekly audience of nearly half a million people.”