LSAT 58 - Section 1 - Question 13

We start out with two sentences containing two distinct ideas: 1) in order to be intriguing one has to inspire the perpetual curiosity of others and 2) constantly expanding our abilities and expanding our intellectual depth will allow one to inspire said curiosity.

Ok, interesting! Actually I take that back, it’s not very interesting, is it? It’s pretty boring. But, what are you going to do? If I had a nickel for every time an LR stimulus was boring I’d have…an inconvenient quantity of nickels!

Ok back to the task at hand. We’ve got these two ideas that we laid out above. They’re very dry and abstract and it’s pretty hard, at first glance, to see if they support one another. Let’s take a closer look:

They do overlap on this one idea: inspiring the perpetual curiosity of others. The first sentence tells us that inspiring this curiosity is necessary in order to be an intriguing person; the second sentence tells us that broadening our abilities and extending intellectual reach can lead to that curiosity. These are two different facets of “the perpetual curiosity of others,” but there is no support relationship here. The second sentence is not an example of an idea put forward in the first sentence nor is it a reason to believe the first sentence, it is pivoting off a subject introduced in the first sentence (perpetual curiosity of others) and introducing a wholly unique idea.

Side note: I can’t tell if Perpetual Curiosity of Others sounds more like a novel or an indie band? What do you think? Actually, don’t answer that. We have a main conclusion to find!

So far, we have yet to identify support, so we can’t really say yet where we might have a premise or conclusion.

Moving on to the third sentence, we start with the word “for” which indicates that a premise is most likely lying in wait. After that we get the idea that “such a perpetual expansion of one’s mind” (referential for extending one’s intellectual reach) will make you a constant mystery to other. This is describing the mechanism through which the idea in the second sentence occurs. This third sentence is directly supporting our second sentence. What does that mean for us? It means that this third sentence is the premise and our second sentence is the main conclusion. We can therefore label our first sentence as context.

Before we go onto the answer choices let’s revisit our main conclusion: “Constantly broadening one’s abilities and extending one’s intellectual reach will enable one to inspire that curiosity [i.e. the perpetual curiosity of others]” Now let’s look for an answer choice that matches!

Answer Choice (A) This is a verbatim reproduction of our context. There’s not much more to say about this answer choice. If you correctly ID the conclusion, you’ll see that it’s wrong. If you mistakenly ID the first sentence as the conclusion, you’ll almost certainly fall for this trap answer.

Correct Answer Choice (B) This is (almost) a word-for-word reproduction of our conclusion. Again, there’s not much more to say about these first two answers. The difficulty for this question lies in correctly identifying the Main Conclusion within the stimulus–if you’ve done that correctly, you’ll almost certainly choose B over A.

Answer Choice (C) This is a description of our final sentence (i.e. our premise). Again, this choice only looks appealing if you’ve misidentified the main conclusion.

Answer Choice (D) This is tempting because it seems to be describing our main conclusion, but we have necessary/sufficient confusion. Our conclusion mapped out conditionally looks like this: broadening abilities + extending intellectual reach → enabled to inspire curiosity

This answer choice mapped out conditionally looks like this: inspire curiosity→BA + EIR. If we understand our conditional logic rules we know that the only way we can flip these conditions is if we negate them both to produce our contrapositive.

Answer Choice (E) The beginning of this AC is spot on: “If one constantly broadens one's abilities and extends one’s intellectual reach…” This is verbatim how our conclusion starts, but unfortunately it’s all downhill from there. We’re then told that one will “always have curiosity.” This argument is about inspiring curiosity in others. Nowhere in the stimulus do we get any information on our own curiosity, so this AC is totally inconsistent with our stimulus.