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#36752
Complete Question Explanation

(See the complete passage discussion here: lsat/viewtopic.php?t=14636)

Must be True. The correct answer choice is (B)

This question asks for the response that can be most reasonably inferred from the passage, so we must
find the answer choice that is consistent with the author’s reasoning. Often the most efficient approach
to this sort of question is to review the choices and quickly eliminate any that are inconsistent with the
passage, and then examine the remaining responses more closely.

Answer choice (A): While the early Chinese settlers did have important, transferable skills, there is
no reason to presume that these were the result of having come from similar climates, and the passage
offers no insight into whether the climate was the reason for their migration.

Answer choice (B): This is the correct answer choice, based on the fact that Chinese settlers brought
these swamp reclamation skills to the Pacific Coast (lines 50-54). As for the fact that these methods were
used in the 19th century, this is confirmed by the fact that the historiographers of the US Pacific Coast
region have, as explicitly stated, traditionally used nineteenth-century European-American accounts
(lines 8-14), and the Chinese settlers discussed fall in the same period (lines 21-27).

Answer choice (C): According to the passage, it was the Chinese settlers who used the wild mustard
seeds, while the European settlers generally viewed the plants as weeds (lines 43-47).

Answer choice (D): It is valuable to study the actions of the Chinese settlers because there was little
recorded by them. The actions of the European settlers have presumably already been considered by the
historiographers, and this is because of the abundance of written sources available.

Answer choice (E): Since the author explicitly states in lines 21-22 that written records never existed in
many cases, this choice, which suggests that such written records did exist at one time, is unsupported.

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