LSAT 135 – Section 2 – Question 14

LSAT 135 - Section 2 - Question 14

December 2011

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Question
QuickView		 Type Tags Answer
Choices		 Curve Question
Difficulty		 Psg/Game/S
Difficulty		 Explanation
PT135 S2 Q14
+LR
+Exp
Most strongly supported +MSS
Conditional Reasoning +CondR
A
3%
155
B
3%
155
C
91%
163
D
2%
154
E
1%
153
128
138
148
 +Easier 146.729 +SubsectionMedium

Early urban societies could not have been maintained without large-scale farming nearby. This is because other methods of food acquisition, such as foraging, cannot support populations as dense as urban ones. Large-scale farming requires irrigation, which remained unfeasible in areas far from rivers or lakes until more recent times.

Summary
The stimulus presents several conditional statements that can be connected.
early urban society → large-scale farming
large-scale-farming → irrigation
irrigation → not far from rivers/lakes
Note that the second sentence of the stimulus tells us that other ways of acquiring food besides large-scale-farming can’t support an urban population. But this just repeats the relationship expressed in the first sentence, so it’s not important.

Strongly Supported Conclusions
The three conditionals can be connected to produce the following inference:
early urban society → not far from rivers/lakes
In other words, early urban societies must not have been far from rivers/lakes.

A
Most peoples who lived in early times lived in areas near rivers or lakes.
Unsupported. Even though early urban societies couldn’t be far from rivers/lakes, most people could have lived in rural, non-urban societies far from rivers/lakes.
B
Only if farming is possible in the absence of irrigation can societies be maintained in areas far from rivers or lakes.
Unsupported. The stimulus only tells us about requirements for large-scale farming, not farming generally. Perhaps small-scale farming is possible through irrigation far from water. And we only know about what’s required for early urban societies, not for modern urban societies.
C
In early times it was not possible to maintain urban societies in areas far from rivers or lakes.
Strongly supported. This is the inference we could anticipate from connecting the conditionals in the stimulus. In diagram form it means “far from rivers/lakes → /early urban societies.” This is the contrapositive of the inference described in the summary above.
D
Urban societies with farms near rivers or lakes do not have to rely upon irrigation to meet their farming needs.
Unsupported. We can infer early urban societies had to have large-scale farming, which required irrigation. This doesn’t tell us what kind of society doesn’t require irrigation.
E
Early rural societies relied more on foraging than on agriculture for food.
Unsupported. We know early urban societies required large-scale farming. But early rural societies may have had small-scale farming and may have relied on it more than foraging. The stimulus doesn’t tell us anything about early rural societies.

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LSAT PrepTest 135 Explanations

Section 1 - Logical Reasoning

Section 2 - Logical Reasoning

Section 3 - Reading Comprehension

Section 4 - Logical Reasoning

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