LSAT 148 | Section 2 | Reading Comprehension: Q10

RC Question 10 Explanation

DISCUSSION: Roughly speaking, the authors believe that:

• People migrate when their expected earnings gains exceeds the costs of migrating (lines 25-29)
• The Great Migration followed this pattern

The right answer will be consistent with this. Three of the wrong answers contradict this.

___________

1. CORRECT. The authors agree with this. They think migration costs are also important. See lines 26-29.
2. The authors seem to treat early migrations as unimportant. They only mention them in passing in lines 4-6, as “While there was some African American migration”.
3. This contradicts the passage. In paragraph 3, the authors lay out a model of migration accepted by mosts economists: “people migrate if their expected earnings increase is large enough to compensate for the costs of migration”. (lines 26-29) Paragraph 4 shows that the Great Migration followed this pattern.
4. The authors don’t believe this. Lines 23-25 show that the authors think that migration cost was also an important factor.
5. This is crazy. The authors aren’t saying that the Great Migration was the first migration in world history! In fact, lines 10-11 implicitly contradict this answer by hinting that there previously had been a great migration of Europeans to the US North.