#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.