Q6 - Historian: Much of what made medieval Europe

[ohthatpatrick]

Question Type:
ID the Conclusion

Stimulus Breakdown:
Conclusion: If modern people had more group tasks relating to basic needs, their communities would become more close-knit.

Evidence: Much of why medieval European communities were close knit stems from the way they met basic needs. To get crops or dig a well, people had to respectfully cooperate and set aside grievances.

Answer Anticipation:
We need a paraphrase of the last sentence.

Correct Answer:
E

Answer Choice Analysis:
(A) That's the first sentence, which is a subsidiary conclusion.

(B) This is almost the last sentence, but it's a "should" claim, whereas the actual last sentence was just a descriptive prediction.

(C) This is pulling from the 2nd sentence.

(D) This was never said.

(E) YES, this is a close paraphrase of the last sentence.

Takeaway/Pattern: Even though we are usually thinking to ourselves, "They'd never put the conclusion as the very last claim, or advertise it with an obvious Conclusion marker like THUS / THEREFORE / SO, on an ID the conclusion question", it's not literally never. It's just the vast majority of the time they avoid putting the conclusion as the last claim. However, there are four ID the Conclusion questions on this test, and this question is early in the section, so we can understand why they might toss us a freebie or make sure we're not dogmatic about following that tendency we've learned from most ID the Conclusion questions.

#officialexplanation

[HayleyF756]

Can you tell me why B is wrong? I thought B was correct because I thought "Much of what made....they went about meeting basic needs" was the conclusion?

I write the LSAT saturday! Plz help

[RamseyM415]

Can you tell me why B is wrong? I thought B was correct because I thought "Much of what made....they went about meeting basic needs" was the conclusion?

I write the LSAT saturday! Plz help

(B) is wrong for a couple of reasons, the simplest of which is it isn't the main conclusion. You can kind of look at it as an intermediate conclusion, but it's simpler just to think of it as follows: The first sentence, combined with the second sentence, support the third sentence; the "So," in the third sentence should have helped to clarify that.

The subtler reason why (B) is wrong, apart from the more obvious reason that it isn't the main conclusion, is that (B) contains a normative statement (a statement about what "should be done"), whereas the author was not making a normative claim. The author was just saying "If people undertook X, their communities would probably Y."