#23 - Specific Reference, Must Be True, Organization

[chian9010]

In answer choice D, what does the author mean the "specific nature of the deficiency"?

In addition, does "a particular kind of remedy" mean "quantitative studies"?

[Malila Robinson]

Hi Chian9010,
The deficiency is the lack of published books and articles about legal topics related to women that were based on medieval court documents.
The specific nature of the deficiency is that while the medieval court docs are mostly written on 3 ft. long parchment, in hard to read handwriting that is often in Latin or Anglo-Normal French and there are thousands of pages to sift through, which seems to give an obvious reason for the lack of published info, instead the deficiency comes from the fact that legal historians don't usually have an interest in women's history, so they don't tend to pursue it or write about it.
The remedy would be increasing the number of legal historians who are interested/willing to pursue large scale quantitative studies on women's legal topics from medieval court documents.

Hope that helps!
-Malila

[snowy]

Hi! Just to confirm, shouldn't we be looking at only the first paragraph for this question? I saw Malila's explanation referred to aspect of the second paragraph, so I wanted to double check this.

I thought the deficiency was a lack of published documents, the specific nature of the deficiency was explored in lines 8-10 (and really all the way until 25), and that sole remedy is quantitative studies (lines 25-28).

[Zach Foreman]

Snowy,
Great question. Unfortunately, there might be a formatting error to blame. I looked at the pdf of the original test and the first paragraph is lines 1-28. I am not sure what source you are using but it might be more ambiguous or even wrong. Let me know where you see the extra paragraph break so that we can correct it. Thanks!

[snowy]

Hi Zach,

Thank you for your response! I'm using the LSAC PrepTests book, and mine does also have the first paragraph from line 1 to 28. I meant that what Malila said ("the medieval court docs are mostly written on 3 ft. long parchment, in hard to read handwriting that is often in Latin or Anglo-Normal French and there are thousands of pages to sift through..." etc.) was in the second paragraph (which starts in line 29 in my book). So, I wanted to confirm if for questions like these we should only be looking to the paragraph specified for the support.

I hope that clarifies what I meant to say!

[Brook Miscoski]

Snowy,

That's correct. To describe the structure of the first paragraph of the passage, you should refer to the first paragraph of the passage. The first paragraph of the passage takes up lines 1-28.

[bonbon94]

Why is D correct and B incorrect? I was stuck between the two and having trouble figuring out which aspects of the passage applied to the organizational framing of each answer

[Jeff Wren]

Hi bonbon,

For a question like this (like most questions in Reading Comprehension), it is critical that you return to the passage (in this case paragraph one) and you prephrase what happens in this paragraph before looking at the answers. If you do this correctly, your prephrase should be similar to Answer D and not at all similar to Answer B.

The paragraph begins with describing the deficiency/problem (the lack of sources), then the paragraph elaborates on the problem by listing which types of information the current sources do not answer, and then the paragraph ends with the only possible solution, "only quantitative studies of large numbers of cases would allow even a guess at the answers to these questions" (my emphasis)(lines 25-27).

This prephrase perfectly matches Answer D.

The easiest way to eliminate Answer B is that it doesn't mention the sole/only solution that is discussed at the end of the paragraph, but Answer B is actually wrong for multiple reasons. In fact, the only part that Answer B gets correct is the first part, "a problem is described."