#22 - Must Be True, Except

[taylorballou]

Hi,

I was wondering if anyone could help explain why answer choice D is correct rather than C. I narrowed down the answer choices to C and D as contenders, and ultimately chose C because I interpreted "similar pattern" to mean a similar but different pattern (not identical as the passage suggests). I thought D did illustrate the concept because the shapes were the same (although different in size) since the Koch curve is made up of the same basic shape that indefinitely repeats / decreases in size.

Thanks,

Taylor

[Jonathan Evans]

Hi, Taylor,

Great question! Let's look at the "description" in the passage that we need to use for evidence to find the correct answer:

elf-similarity: the reiteration of irregular details or patterns at progressively smaller scales so that each part, when magnified, looks basically like the object as a whole.

Essentially, the core concept is pattern repetition in which every part of a whole is similar to the whole itself. This is the distinction between answer choices (C) and (D). In answer choice (C), although the patterns may not be precisely identical, the pattern of each part is still similar to the whole of which it is a part.

In contrast, the similarity among the seeds in answer choice (D) is among different items, not parts of the same item. Thus, (D) does not match the description in the passage as well as does (C).

I hope this helps!

[Blondeucus]

I got to this question and was floored to find out that answer choice D was the correct choice it was an answer I was sure couldn't be correct when answering the question during the test. Any actual correct explanation of why D is correct would be greatly appreciated.

To me 22 is pulling from the passage the definition of self similarity the reiteration of irregular details or patterns at progressively smaller scales so that each part, when magnified looks basically like the object as a whole.

From this reading I eliminated A & E because those are only referring to a specific part of an object not ANY part.

Then when examining B the answer I chose it says each portion of the intricately patterned frost on a window looks like the pattern as a whole. To me this exactly followed my prephase given what I read from the passage so I immediately liked it, it mentions ANY part of a pattern looking like the pattern of a whole bigger object I thought this was a slam dunk.

However when I read C and it was almost exactly the same as answer choice C I was really confused and began studying the two answers to try and find a possible difference that made one better than the other. I spent several minutes didn't find anything conclusive so I went with my initial interpretation.

My initial reading of D was that it didn't follow along with the statement because it's referring to different objects entirely there's not one object that when broken into smaller parts retains the same shape as the bigger object.

That was my thought process when going through this question once again any explanation of how LSAC tried to justify this jank question would be appreciated.

[Jeff Wren]

Hi Blondeucus,

Based on your question, it looks like you missed the word "EXCEPT" in the question.

The question states that "each one of the following illustrates the concept of self-similarity EXCEPT,"
so you're actually looking for the answer that doesn't follow the concept as described in the passage, which is Answer D as you noted.

Don't feel too bad about missing the "EXCEPT." It happens to almost everyone at some point, but the lesson to take from this is to double-check the exact wording of the question, especially if you start seeing more than one answer than looks correct. The test-makers love to use tricky wording in the questions to confuse test takers.