LSAT 127 – Section 2 – Question 24

LSAT 127 - Section 2 - Question 24

December 2003

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Question
QuickView		 Type Tags Answer
Choices		 Curve Question
Difficulty		 Psg/Game/S
Difficulty		 Explanation
PT127 S2 Q24
+LR
Strengthen +Streng
Link Assumption +LinkA
A
50%
167
B
19%
162
C
10%
160
D
16%
163
E
6%
162
154
166
177
 +Hardest 146.61 +SubsectionMedium

Over 40,000 lead seals from the early Byzantine Empire remain today. Apart from the rare cases where the seal authenticated a document of special importance, most seals had served their purpose when the document was opened. Lead was not expensive, but it was not free: most lead seals would have been recast once they had served their purpose. Thus the number of early Byzantine documents sealed in such a fashion must have been many times the number of remaining lead seals.

Summarize Argument
The author concludes that the number of early Byzantine documents sealed using a lead seal must have been much more than 40,000. This is based on the fact that there are about 40,000 lead seals remaining today. In addition, most seals had served their purpose when the document was opened. And, once a seal had served its purpose, it would have been recast.

Notable Assumptions
The author assumes that many documents that were sealed by a lead seal were actually opened. (This overlooks the possibility that the 40,000 lead seals remaining happened to be fixed to the only documents that were written during early Byzantine times and those documents happened to never be opened.)

A
Most of the lead seals produced during the early Byzantine Empire were affixed to documents that were then opened during that period.
This confirms that a large portion of lead seals were on documents that were opened. This would lead to those lead seals being recast, which would suggest the remaining lead seals that were not recast are only a small proportion of the overall lead seals that were created.
B
Most of the lead seals produced during the early Byzantine Empire were affixed to documents that have since been destroyed.
We care about whether the documents were opened, because that would lead to seals being recast. Whether the documents were destroyed doesn’t tell us whether the documents were opened.
C
The amount of lead available for seals in the early Byzantine Empire was much greater than the amount of lead that remains in the seals today.
This tells us there was a lot of lead available for seals in the early Byzantine Empire compared to the lead remaining today. But were many more seals than what remain today actually created during the early Byzantine Empire? (C) doesn’t suggest many more seals were created.
D
During the time of the early Byzantine Empire there were at most 40,000 documents of enough importance to prevent the removing and recycling of the seal.
Placing a limit on the number of documents that would have prevented recycling of the seal doesn’t support the author’s conclusion. In fact, if it were possible for 1 million documents that had seals that wouldn’t have been recycled, that would support the author’s conclusion.
E
During the time of the early Byzantine Empire there were fewer than 40,000 seals affixed to documents at any given time.
The number of seals that were used simultaneously has no clear impact. The issue is the total number of documents that were sealed during the early Byzantine period; whether they were sealed at a given point in time isn’t relevant.

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LSAT PrepTest 127 Explanations

Section 1 - Logical Reasoning

Section 2 - Logical Reasoning

Section 3 - Logical Reasoning

Section 4 - Reading Comprehension

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