Q8

[WaltGrace1983]

This is a function question asking us why the author mentions that the boards were exclusively male.

So what do we do? We should recall where that section of the passage takes place and hunt it down! It looks like it is mentioned in line 21-22. Now, I read some of the information around 21-22 in order to gain a better perspective on the context in which this statement takes place. We see that these male members were "uniformly uneasy about the new idea of sending single women out into the mission field."

From this information, I start to pre-phrase my answer. When I initially pre-phrased this, I thought that perhaps the author mentions this fact in order to show an obstacle the single women had to overcome in order to become missionaries. In addition, I thought maybe that there was a little bit of bias going on within these foreign mission boards, they clearly seemed to be bias towards not sending single women! Maybe they preferred to send men much more? Well the passage never states that but that is where my head went as something to think about.

(A) I don't recall anything about secular organizations sending aid to China and I definitely don't remember anything about contrasting foreign mission boards to other organizations. This passage seems to be exclusively about foreign mission boards. In addition, even if this stuff was mentioned somewhere in the passage, it is nowhere to be found around line 21-22 which gives me a pretty valid reason to eliminate this answer choice (is this reasoning enough for an elimination?)

(B) This is close! However, I wouldn't go so far as to say that any of this is "policy." These men were just "uneasy." Yet more importantly, the author was discussing sending women abroad, not "training them in medicine!" For all we know, the men could have been totally cool with training women in medicine!

(C) This is not really justifying anything, except maybe justifying why women were not going abroad as missionaries before! In addition, we were not discussing professional qualifications anywhere around line 21-22.

(D) Yes! This is very close to what we pre-phrased and is basically saying, 'the author is trying to explain the attitude." This is also very much in scope of what the sentence is talking about whereas the others really aren't.

(E) This would have been right, I think, if the author would have came back with something like, "While the foreign mission boards didn't like sending women, the boards of various parishes certainly did as...". The point is that an opinion of the boards directing parish work was never mentioned - maybe they don't mind if women work as missionaries abroad?

So speaking in the abstract, my question would be this: when we get these "function" questions in which we have to deciphering the meaning of an author mentioning something, is it okay to eliminate answer choices sheerly on the basis of proximity? While I know that this probably goes in line with the overall point of the question (if its not discussed very close to the lines mentioned, then it is probably not apart of the function of the word/phrase), I am just trying to develop ways to become more efficient. It seems that the correct answer to these local "function" questions are routinely based on stuff that is very close to the thing the author "mentioned."

[ohthatpatrick]

Thanks for adding this question to the forum! Great explanation. Since you crushed the "normal human" version of explaining this question, I'll add my quick LSAT Terminator-version of this question and, by means of that, get to an answer to your question.

There's a predominant formula to RC questions with these wordings:
the author mentions ____ in order to
the author's reference to ____ serves to
the author discussed ____ primarily to

(What do they all have in common? The word 'to'. Infinitives, grammatically, convey purpose.)

These questions ask "WHY this detail", whereas According to the Passage question are "WHAT this detail".

Yes, I'm speaking like a caveman / Terminator.

In order to find WHAT, you read the line they're referencing, in this case 21-24. In order to find WHY, you also read 1-2 sentences before and after and look for a bigger claim being made. The correct answer to these questions usually paraphrases/reinforces that bigger claim.

(Small warning: this formula, like most LSAT formulas, is less common to appear or more likely to be tinkered with in new LSATs)

I always think of this type of RC question as BOOKEND questions, because they point us to a sentence of detail, but what they're really testing are the BOOKEND ideas:
- the big claim right BEFORE this detail (this detail is used to illustrate/explain/support that bigger claim)
- the big claim right AFTER this detail (this detail is used as a lead-in to a bigger point)

More often than not, these questions test the big claim right BEFORE the idea in question. This question is testing lines
13-17. LSAT authors love to talk about a noteworthy change and what the underlying causes were.

Line 13-17 says that, increasingly, SINGLE women were getting to do missionary work.

Lines 17-30 explain the background and transition of single women being largely excluded from missionary work to gaining more opportunities to do some.

Part of how we try to read these passages is registering a mental outline of BIG POINT vs. supporting points.

Visually, we can rope off 17-30 and know that it was a bunch of details fleshing out the bigger claim made in 13-17. That tidies up the mental image of the passage.

So my LSAT Terminator goes into a Detail-Purpose question with a pre-phrase of whatever BIGGER CLAIM this specific detail was connected to.

(A) fake comparison (foreign vs. secular)
(B) word blender (these foreign mission boards had nothing to do with the training of Chinese women, which happens in another paragraph)

to answer your question about is that enough to get rid of (B): yes, for these questions, I've never seen a correct answer leave the Paragraph the detail is in, but slightly more than half of them DO leave the sentence the actual detail is in

(C) sexist, thus not a correct LSAT answer. The detail in question is "these mission boards felt uneasy about sending single women", but this answer choice conflates that with "these mission boards felt uneasy about sending professionally unqualified people". Yikes. Not the same.

(D) Yup, that was the topic from the BIG CLAIM that I was looking for: the change from single women NOT getting to do missionary work to getting to do it.

(E) Fake comparison. (mission boards vs. domestic boards)

Of course, in this example, correct answer (D) not only reinforces the BIGGER CLAIM, it also reinforces the internal logic of the sentence itself, lines 21-25. Hence, no need for Terminator here. But to your broader question about where the source material for the correct answer should / shouldn't come ... be careful of a narrow reading window on these questions.

For the correct answer to test something WITHIN the specific detail, rather than NEARBY it, is the exception, not the rule.

[WaltGrace1983]

Wow! Thanks for the fantastic explanation. This definitely helps out my process when attacking these questions.

Though you do have me curious about this:

(Small warning: this formula, like most LSAT formulas, is less common to appear or more likely to be tinkered with in new LSATs)

I haven't taken a look at any of the recent RC's (I have heard they've gotten harder for some reason) but I don't want to develop bad habits for the test I am actually going to take. What exactly do you mean by the quote above?

[ohthatpatrick]

Over time, LSAT tests, like IQ tests, get harder.

You have to do smarter work in 2014 to get a 170 (on either test) than you did in 1990.

This is because both tests are measured not on absolute scales, but relative to other test takers. And as time goes on, the population gets smarter.

If you picture Relative Ordering games, for example ... when these games first appeared, people had little means to prepare for them, so even the easiest forms of these games were challenging.

Nowadays, the typical LSAT taker has practiced DOZENS of Relative Ordering games by test day. So in order for a modern Relative Ordering game to be as challenging for a modern test taker as an old school RO game was for an old school test taker, LSAT has to make the game more complex or offer wrinkles.

Commonly, this takes the form of some rule that actually forks into two possible worlds, two different Relative Ordering trees.

On old LR tests, you would see Inference questions that give you a conditional and simply test you on the contrapositive. We don't get that freebie anymore. If they ARE testing this, they bury the conditional in a paragraph of distracting facts.

Recurring flaws used to fill up many Flaw answer choices. Nowadays, that's not so common. There's often a Bait-n-Switch question in each LR section ... you may read the argument, correctly identify that it's a Part to Whole flaw, but there isn't any answer choice that describes that flaw (this tests your flexible thinking ... can you find a different way to describe something wrong with the argument?)

In RC, the passages are slightly denser and harder to read. Older passages were edited in such a way that finding the big ideas was a little easier. The correct answer to a Main Point question was normally a paraphrase of an individual sentence from the passage. Nowadays, it's much more likely to be a synthesis of several ideas.

All of this stuff is subtle and most students wouldn't be big enough LSAT nerds to notice or care, but the cumulative effect is that the modern tests generally feel a little harder to students than the older ones.

So I was just warning you, as I give you a "cheat code" for most of questions of this type, that you always have to think flexibly and only use tricks, tendencies, to guide your intuition ... but don't force a question to adhere to a pattern you may have learned or observed.