#10 - Concept Reference, Must Be True

[Administrator]

Complete Question Explanation

The correct answer choice is (C).

Answer choice (A):

Answer choice (B):

Answer choice (C): This is the correct answer choice.

Answer choice (D):

Answer choice (E):


This explanation is still in progress. Please post any questions below!

[cgleeson]

Hi,
This question got me really good. I chose A, I realize this is a wrong answer however, I can't make sense of C. Please help.
Regards,
Chris

[Adam Tyson]

Hey Chris, happy to help out here. To answer this question, you should start by doing a little research in the text to prephrase what the correct answer ought to say or do. Since the question is essentially asking why servants were excluded, the best place to start that research is at the beginning of the third paragraph. That's where the author asked that very question, so the answer will be found after that.

Now skim the passage from that point forward and find the answers that the passage gives for why servants were excluded. Along the way it might be wise to keep your eye out for that word "franchise," since that's kind of a strange word to use in this context, and you might have some memory of the author using it.

As I skim, here's what I pick up:

1) The historical tendency not to think of scientific discovery as a work product
2) Contempt for manual labor
3) Servants were wage earners who "were excluded from the franchise because they were perceived as ultimately dependent on their wages and thus controlled by the will of their employers."

Bingo! There's the payoff with the search for "franchise," and that makes this my prephrase! They were excluded from "the franchise" (whatever that means) because it was believed that they were dependent on and controlled by their employers. Look for an answer that resembles this idea.

Answer C is the only one to bring that up dependence, and has to be the best answer. Don't let that bit about politics sway you - I didn't totally understand what they meant about politics in this passage, but they did say some stuff about it, so that doesn't immediately make it wrong. Just focus on your prephrase and pick the best match, and answer C has to come out on top! It sounds a lot like what the passage said, and a lot like what we were actively looking for when we sorted the answers into losers and contenders, and that's all we can hope for.

Now, what does answer C mean? Something like "since these servants were dependent on their employers, they were biased and might not be totally reliable as sources of scientific insight."

One last bit of advice to improve your search for evidence, and that's that on the at-home version of the LSAT (the only option at the time of this writing), you CAN do a keyword search (Ctrl-F or Command-F depending on what kind of system you have). I might have used that feature in this case to search for that word "franchise" since it stood out to me as odd. Sometimes that will take you right to where you need to be in the text to prephrase the answer. Use it carefully, and practice with it, but don't neglect it as a potentially useful tool in your attack on the passages!