LSAT 149 | Section 4 | Logical Reasoning: Q21

LR Question 21 Explanation

QUESTION TEXT: Literary critic: There is little social significance…

QUESTION TYPE: Principle

CONCLUSION: Contemporary novels don’t have much social significance.

REASONING: You can’t enter into the novelist’s mind in contemporary novels.

ANALYSIS: I’ve simplified the reasoning/conclusion to make the gap more obvious. The main gap is between the conclusion and the evidence. The conclusion says modern novels have no social significance. But nothing in the evidence says what makes a novel lack social significance.

I quickly skimmed through the answers and saw only C, D and E mentioned social significance, and only E linked social significance to evidence from the argument (e.g. getting into the mind of novelists).

There are other, smaller gaps in this argument. For instance, we don’t know that sensationalism prevents you from seeing the moral perspective of characters. But that’s a small gap compared to the utter lack of evidence about lack of social significance. I didn’t think much about this potential gap without first checking if any of the answers addressed the major gap, social significance.

___________

1. “Moral sensibilities of the audience” isn’t in the stimulus. This is a nonsense answer that takes a few words from the stimulus and strings them together in a way that’s not relevant.
2. This tells us what an author should do. That’s not what we’re looking for. We’re trying to prove that modern novels lack social significance. 
3. “Moral sensibilities of the audience” isn’t mentioned in the argument. This answer can’t prove anything. 
4. This lets us prove when something will be socially significant. We want to prove that something is not socially significant. In other words, we need a necessary condition for significance, while this answer gives us a sufficient condition.
5. CORRECT. This links the conclusion with the evidence. Without this, we have no evidence that novels lack social significance.