RC Question 7 Explanation
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.
Edit: I guess I got into a bit of a rant, so feel free not to reply. TL;DR: C requires us to infer from 18 units ‘spread throughout’ that Negro Units are coast to coast. I don’t feel this is totally necessary.
I got screwed on this passage because the word national to me kinda implies public, especially given the context of the passage.
I really struggled with this RC passage despite you saying it was fairly easy in question. It tripped me up in 5 (picked A instead of B, though in retrospect A clearly doesn’t imply large enough productions) and again in Q7 (picked B instead of C). On both levels I had thought national required public on some level, which I suppose is wrong. However, I will say even without this mistake 7 feels hard.
What I will say is C here doesn’t feel that compelling. For example, the passage says 28 stats had production units. Maybe we with outside knowledge can say its extremely likely this was coast to coast representation. But in the way that the LSAT tests I could say ‘maybe it wasn’t national because it was maybe the 28 most Eastern states they operated in’. In this case 7C clearly isn’t strengthening the argument that the Negro unit was the closest thing to a national theater, because it features the same layout.
In fact I’d go as far to say 7C could have been more spread coast to coast. It says ‘the vast majority’ basically all happened in the East, which implies at least some happening in the west. This isn’t something we can technically infer from 28 states comment. Even if it was, when does x states become enough to infer it. If they said 15 states presumably we could assume they weren’t necessarily coast to coast. It would be harder to argue the situation wasn’t coast to coast with 40 states.
And the fact that it is 28 states that ends up so significant in establishing whether 7C is a different scenario feels really weird. In fact I don’t think we I wish the passage more directly spoke about how broadly geographically these units were. I should also clarify even the 28 states can’t be taken as a given. While that describes where FTP operates, we know only 18 units existed that did Negro Units. The only info we have that we could infer this to coast to coast is the phrasing ‘spread throughout’. I feel this is too weak. If you told me they had 5 units spread throughout to me that obviously doesn’t necessarily guarantee coast to coast representation. 18 feels not that impressive either. It wouldn’t surprise me if say many of these units were confined to NY and Louisiana and Illinois.
By comparison D is saying practically nobody goes to any other plays. We have >100 people a show versus an org that gets 500k views a week. We could break down the numbers like you did and get a very conservative estimate of 4x the viewership (which assumes daily plays in each production unit, a very uncommon frequency). But even if we do we need to infer that having at minimum 4x the viewership means less than the assumption that the 18 production centers for Negro Units were coast to coast.
Otherwise C could allow a scenario where some other production company was producing content like Negro Units for millions of viewers each week over hundreds of production centers, but doesn’t qualify as national compared to Negro Units because we know this other production company is exclusively East Coast versus the luke warm evidence of the 18 Negro Units being “spread throughout”.
I don’t feel C is a good answer. I won’t say it’s not the best, but I definitely don’t think it’s easy.
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.”