Q26

[ohthatpatrick]

LSAT authors typically bring up examples to support a broader claim they've just made. If a question is asking what something was "an example of", the test essentially wants you to paraphrase what broader claim the author was making in that paragraph before the specific example was mentioned.

In paragraph 2, starting around line 20, the author is explaining Modernism's dominance in architectural criticism.

If you weren't a Modernist, you tended to be dismissed.

If you were starting to get famous and you were maybe kinda Modernist, like Wright and Wagner were, critics would only focus on the Modernist aspects of your work.

So Wright and Wagner are examples of architects who weren't necessarily Modernist, but critics chose to fixate on those aspects of the architects' work.

A) "appreciated by the public" has nothing to do with why the author mentioned these architects.

B) this sounds a bit like what we were anticipating.

C) this is a misinterpretation of the text. The author was not saying that these 2 architects popularized Modernism; the author is saying that Modernism's popularity caused critics to focus on the Modernist aspects of these 2 architects' work.

D) How Wright and Wagner interfaced with their clients isn't mentioned at all.

E) Nothing in the passage specifies Wright and Wagner's "early work". The passage suggests that their work was somewhat Modernist, somewhat not and that critics chose to only focus on the Modernist aspects.

(B) is the answer. Admittedly, it is a bit of a stretch from what is given in the passage. We can't really point to any wording that says that Modernists "claimed Wright and Wagner as their own". However, the fact that the critics only spoke of the Modernist aspects of the work while ignoring non-Modernist aspects supports the idea that the critics wanted to represent Wright and Wagner as Modernist.

[nflamel69]

This question is really unlike the style of the usual RC questions, at least that's how I feel. After I read the question, i prephrased the answer to be something along the line that they are examples of the overreaching extent of MM on architecture criticism. But none of them is anything close.

B is really far fetched for me for 2 reasons. first of all, it nowhere said it was claimed by the proponents, implied, sure. but claimed? It seems to suggest it has to be explicit. second of all, I have trouble seeing how is represent would be correct, the strength of the word just seems to be on the overly strong end.

So I chose A because if there are aspects that are being ignored, how can be their work be appreciated? bu then there's the public, which is also out of scope..

so my question is when it comes down to questions where there is no perfect answer, and every choice seems to have some sort of flaw, whether is detail misinterpretation or strength of modifier or scope issues, how should I deal with it?

[mahamansoor]

B is really far fetched for me for 2 reasons. first of all, it nowhere said it was claimed by the proponents, implied, sure. but claimed? It seems to suggest it has to be explicit. second of all, I have trouble seeing how is represent would be correct, the strength of the word just seems to be on the overly strong end.

Hi Nflamel69,

"Claimed" is being used to strengthen the authors contention or opinion, that the proponents are conveniently ignoring the 'nonmodern' elements of Wright and Wagner's work. "Claim" and imply fall into the same category.

so my question is when it comes down to questions where there is no perfect answer, and every choice seems to have some sort of flaw, whether is detail misinterpretation or strength of modifier or scope issues, how should I deal with it?

Try to hone in on the details. None of the answers fit my prephase either, but I was able to choose B because the other four were DEFINITELY not it as the above posters have noted.

[huskybins]

IMHO, I would consider C is much better than B although I lingered around between those two:

From lines 19 till the end of this para, we can tell it is an illustration to how "tenets of the Movement" tried and made to dominate "mainstream architecture" and "architecture criticism".

Then, how does the author illustrate it? Well, from two aspects: the Modernists suppressed the criticism "not advanced to" the Movement, and selectively ("conveniently") bragged some commonalities between works of Modernists and that of certain architects' works.

So from the above, we can clearly tell a pair of contrasting ideas: if not supportive to my idea --> suppress it; if supportive to my idea --> elevate it. Obviously, that means mentioning those two architects (Wagner& Wright) is because their ideas are supportive to Modernist or as what C suggests -- it can be helpful to "popularize" the Modernist!

From the contrasting perspective, the opposite idea "not to advance" in line 23 is of course "to advance", which is also a very close fit to the second part of the above illustration, in turn which can be nicely rephrased as "popularize".

Then look back to B, it is weird enough as the previous posts pointed out as a stretch: we don't even know whether Wanger or Wright are part of the school of Modernists, how can we say they are able to "represent" the latter as B said?