LSAT 151 | Section 4 | Logical Reasoning: Q4

LR Question 4 Explanation

QUESTION TEXT: Art critic: Nowadays, museum visitors seldom pause to…

QUESTION TYPE: Necessary Assumption

CONCLUSION: People don’t want to engage with art the way they used to.

REASONING: People in museums often look at art for less than a minute. They take a picture and move on.

ANALYSIS: I can think of two necessary assumptions:

1. Museum goers skim over substantially all paintings. If viewers instead skip over only 90% of paintings, but stare for a while at 10% of paintings, then they could be engaging with these. “Seldom” is consistent with a significant minority of paintings.
2. The author is assuming people in the past did stop and look at paintings for longer. Their conclusion was that people “have become” less willing.

I wrote those assumptions before looking at the answers. It turns out neither was used in the answer, but I still think it’s useful to examine flaws in the argument, as it opens your mind to ways in which the argument could be wrong.

The correct answer identified another assumption: perhaps people can engage with a painting even if they look at it only briefly. The author has to assume this is not true.

___________

1. This is a trap, as it seems to hit on the second prephrase I mentioned above: it mentions a difference between today and the past. However, this should have said something about the length of time people looked at paintings in the past, and not the number of them.
    
   Also, when this is negated, it seems to strengthen the argument, not weaken it: now people look at less art and for little time.
   Negation: Museum visitors today don’t look at more art pieces than in the past.
2. This is an explanation for why visitors can move quickly through a museum. But the author wasn’t explaining why visitors could move quickly! The author was explaining the implications of the fact that visitors do move quickly. So visitors could be moving quickly for other reasons, and it wouldn’t affect the author’s argument.
   Negation: Snapshot speed has nothing to do with the speed with which visitors move through art museums.
3. This may be true, but we’re not looking for something true. The author was only talking about willingness to engage, not enjoyment. And sometimes, people aren’t willing to do things they would ultimately enjoy.
   Negation: Spending time with individual works of art is unrelated to people’s enjoyment of museums.
4. This only describes what people do with pictures. It isn’t really relevant to willingness to engage with art in the moment. This may show even more disinterest with art (“they don’t even look at the pictures!”), but it isn’t necessary.
   Negation: Museum visitors somewhat often look at snapshots they took.
5. CORRECT. If this isn’t true, then the argument falls apart. The author’s only evidence about engagement came from how long people look at paintings.
   Negation: The amount of time spent looking at art is not a good measure of how much people engage with the art.