LSAT Passage Structure / Organization

For most of the twentieth century, museum curators in North America treated handwoven textiles produced in the Andean highlands during the colonial period as ethnographic specimens rather than as works of authored art. The textiles were displayed in glass cases beside ceramics and farming implements, captioned by region and material rather than by maker, and rarely lent to exhibitions devoted to painting or sculpture from the same era. Critics who did write about them tended to describe their patterns as anonymous expressions of communal tradition. In a study published last year, the curator Imogen Vasquez argues that this framing has obscured the distinct authorial voices of individual weavers. Drawing on previously unexamined parish records, sale receipts, and inventory lists from the Cuzco region, Vasquez identifies more than forty weavers active between 1680 and 1740 whose work can be tied, by motif and dye signature, to surviving textiles in European and North American collections. Several of these weavers, she shows, deliberately altered standard motifs in ways that critics had previously attributed to regional drift. Vasquez's reattributions have been embraced by museums seeking to revise their permanent labels, and several institutions have already begun reinstalling colonial Andean textiles alongside paintings of the same period. Yet her method depends heavily on dye chemistry comparisons, and the small number of textiles whose dyes have been analyzed limits how confidently her individual attributions can be extended. Vasquez herself acknowledges that broader chemical surveys will be needed before her framework can be applied to collections outside Cuzco, and that the question of how to treat weavers whose names appear in records but whose surviving work cannot be matched remains unresolved.

Which one of the following most accurately describes the organization of the passage?

• A A scholarly framework is described, evidence supporting it is presented, and the framework is shown to resolve a long-standing dispute.
• B A historical practice is described, a recent study challenging that practice is summarized, and a limitation of the study is noted. ✓ Correct
• C Two competing scholarly approaches are introduced, and the author endorses the more recent one as definitive.
• D A scholar's reattribution method is presented, criticisms of the method are surveyed, and a synthesis between the method and its critics is proposed.
• E A traditional curatorial practice is described and then rejected as inconsistent with newly discovered archival evidence.
• F

Early reporting on app-mediated platform labor — driving, delivery, household task work — frequently emphasized the autonomy such platforms gave to workers. Workers, journalists noted, could log in and out at will, choose which jobs to accept, and combine platform work with other commitments. This framing dominated business press coverage for several years and shaped early regulatory debates, in which platforms argued that traditional employee classifications were ill-suited to a workforce that prized flexibility above all. A recent ethnographic study by the sociologist Marta Reyes complicates this picture. Reyes followed 112 platform workers across three midsize cities for fourteen months, recording the patterns by which workers actually accepted and declined jobs. She found that, in practice, workers' apparent freedom to decline was tightly constrained by ranking algorithms that penalized declines and by surge-pricing structures that concentrated earnings into narrow windows. Workers who exercised their nominal autonomy by declining unfavorable jobs saw measurable drops in subsequent job offers. Reyes is careful, however, not to claim that her findings settle the classification question. She notes that her sample skewed toward workers in dense urban markets where the algorithms she describes are most aggressive, and that platform workers in smaller markets, or in non-driving categories, may experience the constraints differently. Her conclusion is that future regulatory frameworks will need to distinguish among platform work types rather than apply a single classification across the entire sector.

The passage proceeds primarily by:

• A presenting an early characterization of a phenomenon, summarizing a study that complicates it, and noting the study's own limits ✓ Correct
• B describing a regulatory dispute, evaluating two competing positions in the dispute, and endorsing one position
• C introducing a sociological method, applying it to a case, and demonstrating its superiority over journalistic reporting
• D reporting an early consensus, refuting that consensus with new evidence, and proposing a unified replacement framework
• E comparing two sociological studies and arguing that their findings should be combined into a single account
• F

Cognitive scientists have long treated a centralized nervous system as a prerequisite for behavior that counts as problem-solving. On this view, an organism that can adjust its behavior in response to changing conditions, weigh trade-offs, or remember past outcomes must possess something like neurons; without neurons, apparent problem-solving is mechanical responsiveness rather than cognition. A series of laboratory experiments by the biologist Fei Liu has unsettled this assumption. Working with the slime mold Physarum polycephalum — a single-celled organism with no neurons — Liu showed that the organism, when offered food sources of differing quality at varying distances, consistently routed its growth toward configurations that maximized nutrient yield while minimizing transport length. In follow-up trials, Liu introduced periodic mild shocks at certain locations; the slime mold subsequently avoided those locations even after several hours during which no shocks had been delivered. Skeptics have offered a deflationary reading. The slime mold's adjustments, they argue, can be fully explained by chemical gradients and intracellular signaling pathways; what looks like memory may be the slow decay of a chemical marker rather than anything cognitive. Liu has responded that the deflationary reading, while consistent with the data, requires increasingly elaborate auxiliary assumptions as the experimental conditions grow more complex. The debate, at present, turns on what level of behavioral flexibility one takes to be sufficient for the label 'cognition.' Both sides agree on what the slime mold does; they disagree on what to call it.

Which one of the following most accurately describes the organization of the passage?

• A A long-standing scientific assumption is stated, experimental findings that challenge it are presented, a deflationary counter-explanation is described, and the author concludes that the assumption has been overturned.
• B A scientific dispute is introduced, two experimental programs are compared, and the more recent program is shown to be methodologically superior.
• C A scientific assumption is described, experimental findings that put pressure on it are presented, a competing interpretation of those findings is described, and the unresolved nature of the debate is characterized. ✓ Correct
• D A definition of cognition is proposed, evidence consistent with that definition is presented, and counterexamples to the definition are surveyed.
• E A biological phenomenon is described, two equally plausible mechanisms for it are proposed, and a method for distinguishing between them is recommended.
• F