Lesson 2, RC, Passage# 4, Question No. 5

[DannyB]

The Question reads: The passage suggests that the author would be most likely to agree with which one of the following claims about the Aurignacians?

The choice marked correct is C: "They had established some highly specialized social roles."

The justification given is the last sentence: "In other words, the high level of quality suggests that Aurignacian art was created by a distinct group of artists, who would likely have spent most of their time practicing and passing on their skills while being supported by other members of their community."

I chose choice E: "They carved images of their intended prey on their weapons to increase the weapons’ efficacy."


My justification was taken from the middle of the last paragraph: "The images were probably intended to make these animals vulnerable to the weapons of the hunters.."

If the images were intended to make the animals more vulnerable to their weapons, wouldn't that accomplish the role of efficacy?

While, I see how the single individualized group, the artists, can be justification for "some highly specially...", choice E seems to be taken write from the text.

[DannyB]

right* from the passage, that is

[Jeff Wren]

Hi Danny,

You want to be very careful when reading anything on the LSAT (especially in Reading Comp) to be precise with exactly what a sentence says and not make unwarranted assumptions.

The paintings discussed in the passage are "cave paintings"(line 5), meaning paintings that were made on the walls of caves. They were not made on the hunters' weapons. Nowhere in the passage is that stated or even implied.

If the paintings had been made on the weapons, there probably wouldn't have been any debate about why they were put on the weapons. Instead, these paintings were found on the cave walls, and one theory was that they were just made for artistic purposes because they were so well painted.

However, based on the fact that the paintings were of animals that the Aurignacians hunted and had markings of the animals' vital organs (along with the fact that the paintings were in hard to reach caves rather than displayed where everyone could easily view them), many anthropologists hypothesize that these paintings were meant to be magical/religious in order to help the hunters hunt the animals.

The lines that you cited, "these images were probably intended to make these animals vulnerable to the weapons of hunters" (lines 43-45) does not mean that they were painted on the weapons themselves. You are thinking too literally. (In other words, that's not the way that the magic worked. Simply by representing the animals and their vital organs on the cave walls was thought to make the animals vulnerable, sort of like a Voodoo doll.) It may not make a lot of sense to us in the twenty-first century, but it presumably made sense to the Aurignacians 25,000 years ago.

[DannyB]

I just realized that I misread the answer choice. Boy. Yes, of course, they didn't carve images of their prey on their weapons. I think that as I was reading the answer choice and saw carved images, I immediately thought of the last portion of the passage regarding using the imagery to make the prey vulnerable to the weapons and got over-zealous and didn't read the wording of the answer carefully enough.

It might make sense for me to slow down, a little, while I'm learning how to approach the reading comp. Once I establish some firm do's and don'ts, etc. then I'll try to get closer to the suggested avg. time per passage. I think it's the pressure of the exam being about 9 weeks away that caused me to sacrifice quality in favor of speed.

The reverse is true...hopefully: speed will come, when the quality of attention that I pay to the passage and the wording of the questions improves.

[DannyB]

Thanks, Jeff.