Q4

[hyewonkim89]

I'm having a hard time eliminating (D) and (E).

Also, is "the text" in this question the biography the author discusses?

For a first passage, it was a bit challenging for me.

Thanks in advance.

[ohthatpatrick]

Yeah, this passage was totally unique. I've never seen an RC passage that sounded like an excerpt from the introduction to a book / dissertation.

As Q5 (C) notes, this is the introduction to a 'text', which will be the biographical study of Tucker.

Q4's question stem just echoes that same language, so, yes, the 'text' referred to in the question stem is not the passage we read but the forthcoming biographical study of Tucker that is described in what we read.

Let's come up with reasons to get rid of all the wrong answers:

(A) the author never draws a distinction between popular and academic. This answer seems to go counter to the passage, since the author indicates that there's 'insufficient scholarship' about a period of US entertainment history and that his present study will help shed some light on that. So the author seems to WANT this to be included in the academic world of scholarship.

(B) I don't know how to support "innovative" research methods. Nothing about what the author described was identified as new or different.

(C) This actually goes back to what we said for (A) and again to lines 15-18. LSAT authors LOVE to "fill in the gaps" / "correct the record" / "highlight a deficiency in scholarship", so I'm not surprised to see an answer choice deal with this.

(D) Why wouldn't the author want it be taken as a mainly objectively accurate historical record? The author took a couple paragraphs to help convince us of the accuracy of this biography. The author admitted the potential hazards of using interviews with the subject as a primary source. The author was trying to indicate to us that he REALIZES the potential for INaccuracy when you trust someone's reports about their own life. Hence, the author reassured us that he fact-checked everything he could, and generally omitted anything he couldn't fact check. In the last paragraph, he reassures us that for the more rare cases in which he included something Tucker said that could NOT be verified, what was said still seemed to fit into a consistent picture with the verifiable facts.

(E) The author is presenting a biography of Tucker so that it can be used to verify the authenticity of US entertainment memorabilia? The only thing that relates to memorabilia is the mention in the first paragraph that Tucker was a big collector of African American theater and film memorabilia. Those artifacts are meant to help tell the story of a part of US entertainment history. Tucker's biography is NOT meant to be a how-to guide for "verifying the authenticity of US entertainment memorabilia". (this answer isn't even restricted to the African American memorabilia that Tucker owned)

I can see how (D) and (E) were tempting.

(D) is tempting because the author discusses potential ways the biography COULD HAVE failed to be accurate.

(E) is tempting just because of the familiar wording of 'memorabilia'.

For (D), it's important we really understand the function of P# and P4 are to raise and satisfy concerns about accuracy.

For (E), it's important to just re-read the line about memorabilia to see what it WAS intended to do, so that we're confident that what (E) says is NOT what it intended to do.

Hope this helps.

[yitzkram]

Why is C correct? The passage does not address whether the research will be interesting.

[ohthatpatrick]

It's just the safest answer available. You're allowed to use common sense in evaluating these answers. This author is introducing her study.

Wouldn't it be highly implausible for someone to write a study and NOT think the subject matter was interesting? Why write the study then?

Correct answers for "inferred / implies / suggests / most likely to agree" don't provide verbatim word matches. They provide meaning matches, but are heavy with synonyms.

As we noted above, in line 16 the author is saying that the contents of this study will "help shed new light on a part of history about which there has been insufficient scholarship".

Breaking new ground = shedding new light = investigating something that hasn't been sufficiently investigated = interesting.