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General questions relating to LSAT Logical Reasoning.
 dhilliard
  • Posts: 2
  • Joined: Aug 28, 2014
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#16358
Hi,

can someone please give me their approach to the following question? The answer is A. and I was caught between A. and C.

Thanks!

Some people mistakenly believe that since we do not have direct access to the distant past we cannot learn much about it. Contemporary historians and archaeologists find current geography, geology, and climate to be rich in clues about a given regions's distant history. However, the more distant the period we are studying is, the less useful the study of the present becomes.

Of the following, which one most closely conforms to the principle that the passage illustrates?

A. Astronomers often draw inferences about the earlier years of our solar system on the basis of recently collected data. Unfortunately, they have been able to infer comparatively little about the origin of our solar system.

B. Much can be learned about the perpetrator of a crime by applying scientific methods of investigation to the crime scene. But the more the rime scene has been studied the less likely anything will be learned from further study.

C. To understand a literary text one needs to understand the author's world view. However, the farther that world view gets from one's own the less one will be able to appreciate the text.

D. We often extrapolate from ordinary sensory experience to things beyond such experience and form a rash judgment, such as the claim that the earth is the center of the universe because it appears that way to us.

E. One crucial clue to the extent of the ancient Egyptians mathematical knowledge came from studying the pyramids. The more we studied such structures, the more impressed we were by how much the Egyptians knew.
 Robert Carroll
PowerScore Staff
  • PowerScore Staff
  • Posts: 1819
  • Joined: Dec 06, 2013
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#16371
d,

The situation in the stimulus is one where current information can allow one to infer something about the past, but where the utility of that information for this purpose diminishes as the events get more distant in time.

Answer choice (C) does not have this situation - we are not inferring about the past from present information. Only answer choice (A) has this relation.

Robert Carroll

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