LSAT 145 – Section 2 – Question 02

LSAT 145 - Section 2 - Question 02

December 2015

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Question
QuickView		 Type Tags Answer
Choices		 Curve Question
Difficulty		 Psg/Game/S
Difficulty		 Explanation
PT145 S2 Q02
+LR
Strengthen +Streng
Causal Reasoning +CausR
A
1%
161
B
1%
156
C
1%
150
D
96%
163
E
1%
150
122
131
141
 +Easiest 145.859 +SubsectionMedium

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Anthropologist: One of the distinctive traits of humans is the ability to support a large brain with a small gut, which requires getting more calories from less food. It was likely the development of cooking that made this possible. After all, our ancestors developed large brains around the time that they began to control fire. And even today, people who choose to eat only raw food have difficulty getting enough calories.

Summarize Argument: Phenomenon-Hypothesis
The anthropologist hypothesizes that cooking was probably the development that enabled humans to get enough calories from their food to support a larger brain. This is based on the observation that humans developed larger brains around the same time as starting to control fire, and the observation that it’s hard for people to get enough calories by eating raw food.

Notable Assumptions
The anthropologist assumes that humans began to cook around the time they began to control fire.
The anthropologist also assumes that there isn’t another reason why people who eat raw food have more difficulty getting enough calories—for example, that they are not eating significantly less than people who eat cooked food.

A
Cooked foods contain the same number of calories as raw foods.
This weakens the anthropologist’s hypothesis, as it rules out one possible mechanism for how cooking food increases the number of calories available from that food—that is, that cooking could add more calories to the food.
B
Raw meat contains more calories than a similar quantity of raw vegetables.
This is irrelevant, because the argument only compares raw food to cooked food. Comparisons between different types of raw food don’t help us support the anthropologist’s hypothesis.
C
The human body is able to extract a similar number of calories from cooked food and raw food.
This weakens by effectively ruling out the cooking of food as a mechanism for humans to get more calories from less food; instead, this would mean that cooking food makes no difference to how many calories humans can get from it.
D
The human body uses more calories to process raw food than it uses to process cooked food.
This strengthens the anthropologist’s hypothesis by providing a mechanism for humans to get more calories from cooked food than raw food.
E
Domesticated plants and animals are richer in calories than their wild counterparts are.
This is irrelevant, because we don’t have any information about when humans started eating domesticated plants and animals in relation to when they started using fire. Without a timeline, this can’t help us.

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LSAT PrepTest 145 Explanations

Section 1 - Reading Comprehension

Section 2 - Logical Reasoning

Section 3 - Reading Comprehension

Section 4 - Logical Reasoning

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