Q5

[agersh144]

Can someone please help me out with this? Where is our support for A the requirement was imposed more for social than for aesthetic reasons?

Is is 29-32? I can see perhaps how it could say for social reasons (i.e. post-Civil war) but were does it get the aesthetic foil from?

[ohthatpatrick]

Good question.

I think 29-32 was a good reference.

I also think that lines 6-10 are probably the most helpful. We really get "social" from the fact African Americans were expected to adopt Western European standards "in order to" promote racial acceptance and integration.

Promoting racial acceptance/integration is definitely a "social", not "aesthetic" goal.

You're not going to find the "aesthetic" foil, because I think it's just implicit in the discussion of a writer and a literary tradition that normally rules/tendencies/formats within a literary tradition are there to serve some artistic, "aesthetic" purpose.

It's almost like if I told you that a personal trainer asked his clients to smile while they did push-ups so that they would think of push-ups as a pleasant memory.

We might say that he advocates smiling for "psychological rather than physiological reasons". We only discussed the psychological reason, but the "physiological" is just what we expect would be the default reason for doing anything based on the context of a personal trainer.

Hope this helps.

[hsu.chiang]

Can someone help me with (D)? Why is (D) not correct? I thought the passage talks about the spirituals were Europeanized, so maybe it was appropriate for the spirituals.

[Aquamarine]

I have a same question too.
Why D is a wrong answer?

Can anyone explain me?
Thanks!

[ohthatpatrick]

When RC question stems say
"suggests"
"inferred"
"implies"
"most likely to agree"
the correct answer is usually testing us on a tricky paraphrase of some line reference from the passage.

To know you're getting the correct answer, you should have a line reference to prove your answer.

You should also find broken language in the four wrong answer choices. The most common type of broken language is
- extreme words
- comparisons
- out of scope ideas

The keywords in this question stem indicate that we should be looking in the first paragraph for support.

Lines 8-10 and 30-32 are the most direct connection to the keywords.

(A) is the correct answer.
Lines 6-10 provide support. The requirement to reflect and master Western European styles was "in order to" promote racial acceptance and integration.

(B) this choice seems contradicted by lines 3-4. The requirement to use European techniques is identified as one of two "well-established" traditions. So we can't say that it was "relatively unimportant".

(C) this has the extreme claim the CHIEF reason for Hughes's success. Hughes actually resisted following this requirement, so this answer, in addition to being too extreme to support, seems to go against the gist of the passage.

(D) this choice has pretty safe language, but I can't find any supporting text. Previous posters mentioned that we know that some works were Europeanized. How do we know the author thinks that doing so was appropriate? As the poster wrote, "MAYBE the author thought that was appropriate". Sure, maybe the author did. But LSAT can't make a correct answer speculative. It has to have written support.

There are no lines that indicate the author condones the Europeanizing. Also, this answer needs us to find textual support that the author DID condone Europeanizing some things and DIDN'T condone Europeanizing other things.

We just can't find any lines that do such a thing.

I found this answer less appealing, from a fuzzy big picture, because the passage as a whole seems to celebrate Hughes by highlighting his REFUSAL to follow the normal trends. If an author thinks Hughes was awesome for NOT Europeanizing his works, then the author probably didn't have a lot of respect for the tradition of Europeanizing in the first place.

(E) this makes an unsupported comparison between how strong the requirement APPEARED to be vs. how strong it WAS. I can't find any line reference to address that comparison.

Hope this helps.

[mornincounselor]

I pre phased the answer to this question as, "it excluded a number of good works, and it was a false construct."

This allowed me to eliminate B, C, and D.

E seems to be indirectly supported. There was this requirement yet the passage is about an author who defied the requirement and (line 54) "helped to modify the previous restriction. . . " But, just because the passage highlights an individual who helped to overcome a restriction, that doesn't mean the restriction was any less "strong".

A, on the other hand, is undoubted supported. (Line 19) "northern White writers" thought highly of the aesthetic elements of the sorrow songs, yet, the works had to be modified for some other reason (the social reason.)