Q14 - Max: As evidence mounts showing the terrible

[ohthatpatrick]

Question Type:
Role/Function

Stimulus Breakdown:
Max: technology has wrought damage on the environment, so we must return to a natural way of living.
Cora: Using technology is a natural way of living (we've been doing that for thousands of years. So, your idea sucks.

Answer Anticipation:
The role it played was an exploding fireball in Max's face. Cora basically said, "Max, you're contradicting yourself. It IS natural to use technology. So we don't get back to natural living by abandoning technology."

Correct Answer:
A

Answer Choice Analysis:
(A) Yes, this seems fair. The 'alleged cause' of terrible changes was technology, and Cora was arguing that technology was natural. Thus, she was saying "it's incorrect to call it unnatural". Thanks for the double negative, LSAT.

(B) There is no mention of whether humans have benefited.

(C) Max's conclusion is that "humans must return to natural way", not that "tech was wrought terrrible changes".

(D) Cora isn't saying "it'll be difficult to return to a natural way"; she's saying "we are CURRENTLY living a natural way: using tech, for better or worse, is how humans live."

(E) There is no mention of morality (right/wrong) in this conversation. Max hasn't morally blamed us for messing up the environment with tech. He's only suggested that since we observe our technology doing so much damage, we must return to a natural way of living. There's probably a moral tinge to his comments (i.e. "it would be wrong to keep messing up the environment, so we should return to a natural way") but there is nothing in Cora's response that sounds related to any moral question. She's just pointing out a fun fact that our use of technology actually IS a natural way of living.

Takeaway/Pattern: This might be the first example we've ever seen where a Role/Function question was asked about how a 2nd person responded to the 1st. But there have been many questions that simply ask "How did the 2nd person respond?" In either case, we just need to characterize the 2nd person's response in terms of how it relates to the 1st person's (typically, the 2nd person accepts the evidence but disagrees with an assumption or raises considerations that show that a different conclusion is possible). In this case, the 2nd person basically explained that the 1st person's conclusion was self-contradictory.

(A) picked the weirdest wording it could think of to describe this, because it otherwise would be too easy. With abstract language, we should pause and assign the generic words a specific value ("the alleged cause" = technology). With double negatives and statements of disagreement, we should clean up the meaning and state it positively ("cannot correctly be described as unnatural" = would be correctly described as natural).

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