LSAT Inference From Passage

For most of the twentieth century, archaeologists working in the highlands of what is now southern Peru assumed that the spread of a distinctive ceramic style — characterized by stepped geometric designs and a deep maroon slip — indicated the political reach of a single highland polity. Excavations in the 1960s and 1970s reinforced this view: the ceramics appeared in burial sites across a wide arc of valleys, and their stylistic features were remarkably consistent. Recent work by the historian Marta Reyes has complicated this picture. Reyes points out that consistency of style is not the same as consistency of origin. Through neutron activation analysis of clay samples from more than four hundred vessels, her team has shown that the ceramics were produced in at least seven distinct workshops, several of them hundreds of kilometers apart. Some of these workshops appear to predate the polity by nearly a century. Reyes argues that what earlier archaeologists read as the imprint of conquest may instead reflect a much older trade network in which local potters borrowed and refined a prestigious design vocabulary. She is careful, however, to note that her findings do not by themselves rule out political influence; they only show that the ceramic distribution cannot serve as evidence of it. Other archaeologists have responded with caution. Fei Liu has acknowledged the strength of the chemical evidence but has argued that Reyes underestimates the difficulty of explaining such tight stylistic uniformity without some coordinating institution, whether political or religious. The debate, Liu suggests, is far from settled, and may require integrating Reyes's compositional data with new excavation at the workshop sites themselves before any firm conclusion about the polity's actual reach can be drawn.

It can most reasonably be inferred from the passage that Reyes would agree with which one of the following statements?

• A The highland polity exercised no meaningful political influence over the valleys in which the distinctive ceramics have been found.
• B Stylistic uniformity across a region is, by itself, insufficient to establish that the region was politically unified. ✓ Correct
• C Neutron activation analysis is the most reliable method available for determining the political boundaries of ancient polities.
• D The ceramic workshops identified by her team were established as a direct result of trade with the highland polity.
• E Future excavation at the workshop sites will confirm that the polity's reach was substantially smaller than earlier archaeologists believed.

Behavioral ecologists have long puzzled over the elaborate vocal duets performed by mated pairs of certain tropical wrens. In these duets, the male and female alternate notes with such precision that the resulting song sounds, to the human ear, as if it were produced by a single bird. Early researchers proposed that the duets functioned primarily to strengthen the pair bond, much as coordinated movement is thought to do in some primates. More recent fieldwork has called this explanation into question. Studies by the biologist Hana Okafor have shown that duetting rates rise sharply when neighboring pairs encroach on a territory and fall during periods of low neighbor pressure. Okafor argues that the duets function chiefly as joint territorial advertisements: a duet signals not only that a territory is occupied but that it is defended by a coordinated pair, which intruders apparently treat as a more formidable obstacle than a lone defender. Okafor is careful not to dismiss the pair-bonding hypothesis entirely. She notes that within mated pairs, the precision of duetting improves over the course of a breeding season, and that pairs whose duets become more synchronized are also more likely to remain together across seasons. This correlation, she suggests, may indicate that duetting reinforces the pair bond as a secondary effect, even if territorial signaling is its principal function. Critics, however, point out that the same correlation could be explained the other way around: pairs that are already well-bonded may simply have more opportunities to practice. Resolving this question, Okafor concedes, will require longitudinal data that her current study does not provide.

Which one of the following can be most reasonably inferred from the passage?

• A The precision of a tropical wren pair's duet is the single best predictor of whether the pair will remain together across breeding seasons.
• B Tropical wren duets evolved specifically in response to high densities of neighboring pairs.
• C Okafor regards the relationship between duet synchronization and pair stability as not yet definitively established as causal in either direction. ✓ Correct
• D Most behavioral ecologists now agree that the pair-bonding hypothesis has been conclusively refuted by Okafor's fieldwork.
• E Intruding wrens are unable to distinguish between the songs of a single defender and the duet of a coordinated pair.

In a 2019 essay, the legal scholar Ahmed Beldi observed that contract law in many common-law jurisdictions has quietly absorbed a doctrine borrowed from civil-law traditions: the duty of good faith in contractual performance. Courts in these jurisdictions have not, for the most part, openly announced this borrowing. Instead, they have folded good-faith reasoning into older common-law categories, treating it as a clarification of existing duties rather than as the importation of a new one. Beldi argues that this quiet absorption is methodologically significant, regardless of whether one approves of the doctrine itself. When a borrowed concept is announced openly, courts and commentators can debate its scope, its sources, and its limits. When it is absorbed silently, those debates do not happen — or happen only in scattered footnotes — and the doctrine settles into the law without the kind of scrutiny that conventionally attends doctrinal change. Beldi is careful to note that he is not claiming the absorbed doctrine is bad law; he expresses no firm view on its merits. His objection is to the manner of adoption, not the substance of what has been adopted. Critics have countered that quiet absorption is in fact one of the common law's traditional strengths, allowing it to evolve incrementally without provoking unnecessary controversy. Beldi has responded that this defense conflates incremental development of native common-law doctrine with the unannounced transplantation of a doctrine from another legal tradition, and that the two raise different concerns about transparency.

It can most reasonably be inferred from the passage that Beldi would be most likely to agree with which one of the following statements?

• A The duty of good faith in contractual performance is, on the merits, a poor fit for common-law jurisdictions.
• B Courts that have absorbed the good-faith doctrine have done so in a manner that has limited the kind of scrutiny doctrinal change typically receives. ✓ Correct
• C Common-law courts should refrain from drawing on civil-law concepts under any circumstances.
• D Incremental evolution of native common-law doctrine is, on balance, a less transparent process than the open transplantation of foreign doctrine.
• E The good-faith doctrine has been more fully developed in civil-law jurisdictions than in common-law ones.