FREE LSAT® PRACTICE QUESTIONS

When a forest is subject to acid rain, the calcium level in the soil declines. Spruce, fir, and sugar maple trees all need calcium to survive. However, sugar maples in forests that receive significant acid rain are much more likely to show signs of decline consistent with calcium deficiency than are spruces or firs in such forests.

Which one of the following, if true, most helps to explain the greater decline among sugar maples?

• A. Soil in which calcium levels are significantly diminished by acid rain is also likely to be damaged in other ways by acid rain.
• B. Sugar maples that do not receive enough calcium deteriorate less rapidly than spruces or firs that do not receive enough calcium.
• C. Spruces and firs, unlike sugar maples, can extract calcium from a mineral compound that is common in soil and is not affected by acid rain.
• D. Sugar maples require more calcium in the spring and summer than they do in the fall and winter.
• E. Unlike spruces or firs, most sugar maples are native to areas that receive a lot of acid rain.

PT 65, Section 4, Q. 1

Travel industry consultant: Several airlines are increasing elbow room and leg room in business class, because surveys show that business travelers value additional space more than, say, better meals. But airlines are overconcerned about the comfort of passengers flying on business; they should instead focus on the comfort of leisure travelers, because those travelers purchase 80 percent of all airline tickets.

Which one of the following, if true, most weakens the reasoning in the travel industry consultant’s argument?

• A. Business travelers often make travel decisions based on whether they feel a given airline values their business.
• B. Some airlines have indicated that they will undertake alterations in seating space throughout the entire passenger area of their planes in the near future.
• C. Sleeping in comfort during long flights is not the primary concern of leisure travelers.
• D. A far greater proportion of an airline’s revenues is derived from business travelers than from leisure travelers.
• E. Most leisure travelers buy airline tickets only when fares are discounted.

PT 65, Section 4, Q. 3

Rolanda: The house on Oak Avenue has a larger yard than any other house we’ve looked at in Prairieview, so that’s the best one to rent.

Tom: No, it isn’t. Its yard isn’t really as big as it looks. Property lines in Prairieview actually start 20 feet from the street. So what looks like part of the yard is really city property.

Rolanda: But that’s true of all the other properties we’ve looked at too!

Rolanda’s response to Tom suggests that Tom commits which one of the following reasoning errors?

• A. He fails to take into account the possibility that there are advantages to having a small yard.
• B. He presumes, without providing justification, that property that belongs to the city is available for private use.
• C. He improperly applies a generalization to an instance that it was not intended to cover.
• D. He fails to apply a general rule to all relevant instances.
• E. He presumes, without providing justification, that whatever is true of a part of a thing is also true of the whole.

PT 65, Section 4, Q. 11

The best jazz singers use their voices much as horn players use their instruments. The great Billie Holiday thought of her singing voice as a horn, reshaping melody and words to increase their impact. Conversely, jazz horn players achieve their distinctive sounds by emulating the spontaneous twists and turns of an impassioned voice. So jazz consists largely of voicelike horns and hornlike voices.

Which one of the following most accurately describes the role played in the argument by the claim that the best jazz singers use their voices much as horn players use their instruments?

• A. It is the argument’s main conclusion and is supported by another statement, which is itself supported by a further statement.
• B. It is the argument’s only conclusion, and each of the other statements in the argument is used to support it.
• C. It is a statement for which some evidence is provided and which in turn is used to provide support for the argument’s main conclusion.
• D. It is a statement for which no evidence is provided but which itself is used to support the argument’s only conclusion.
• E. It is a statement used to support a conclusion that in turn is used to support the argument’s main conclusion.
• 
  PT 65, Section 4, Q. 12

The two passages discuss recent scientific research on music. They are adapted from two different papers presented at a scholarly conference.

Passage A

Did music and human language originate separately or together? Both systems use intonation and rhythm to communicate emotions. Both can be produced vocally or with tools, and people can produce both music and language silently to themselves.

Brain imaging studies suggest that music and language are part of one large, vastly complicated, neurological system for processing sound. In fact, fewer differences than similarities exist between the neurological processing of the two. One could think of the two activities as different radio programs that can be broadcast over the same hardware. One noteworthy difference, though, is that, generally speaking, people are better at language than music. In music, anyone can listen easily enough, but most people do not perform well, and in many cultures composition is left to specialists. In language, by contrast, nearly everyone actively performs and composes.

Given their shared neurological basis, it appears that music and language evolved together as brain size increased over the course of hominid evolution. But the primacy of language over music that we can observe today suggests that language, not music, was the primary function natural selection operated on. Music, it would seem, had little adaptive value of its own, and most likely developed on the coattails of language.

Passage B

Darwin claimed that since “neither the enjoyment nor the capacity of producing musical notes are faculties of the least [practical] use to man...they must be ranked amongst the most mysterious with which he is endowed.” I suggest that the enjoyment of and the capacity to produce musical notes are faculties of indispensable use to mothers and their infants and that it is in the emotional bonds created by the interaction of mother and child that we can discover the evolutionary origins of human music.

Even excluding lullabies, which parents sing to infants, human mothers and infants under six months of age engage in ritualized, sequential behaviors, involving vocal, facial, and bodily interactions. Using face-to-face mother-infant interactions filmed at 24 frames per second, researchers have shown that mothers and infants jointly construct mutually improvised interactions in which each partner tracks the actions of the other. Such episodes last from one-half second to three seconds and are composed of musical elements—variations in pitch, rhythm, timbre, volume, and tempo.

What evolutionary advantage would such behavior have? In the course of hominid evolution, brain size increased rapidly. Contemporaneously, the increase in bipedality caused the birth canal to narrow. This resulted in hominid infants being born ever-more prematurely, leaving them much more helpless at birth.

This helplessness necessitated longer, better maternal care. Under such conditions, the emotional bonds created in the premusical mother-infant interactions we observe in Homo sapiens today—behavior whose neurological basis essentially constitutes the capacity to make and enjoy music—would have conferred considerable evolutionary advantage.

Both passages were written primarily in order to answer which one of the following questions?

• A. What evolutionary advantage did larger brain size confer on early hominids?
• B. Why do human mothers and infants engage in bonding behavior that is composed of musical elements?
• C. What are the evolutionary origins of the human ability to make music?
• D. Do the human abilities to make music and to use language depend on the same neurological systems?
• E. Why are most people more adept at using language than they are at making music?

PT June 2007, Sec 4, Q09

The two passages discuss recent scientific research on music. They are adapted from two different papers presented at a scholarly conference.

Passage A

Did music and human language originate separately or together? Both systems use intonation and rhythm to communicate emotions. Both can be produced vocally or with tools, and people can produce both music and language silently to themselves.

Brain imaging studies suggest that music and language are part of one large, vastly complicated, neurological system for processing sound. In fact, fewer differences than similarities exist between the neurological processing of the two. One could think of the two activities as different radio programs that can be broadcast over the same hardware. One noteworthy difference, though, is that, generally speaking, people are better at language than music. In music, anyone can listen easily enough, but most people do not perform well, and in many cultures composition is left to specialists. In language, by contrast, nearly everyone actively performs and composes.

Given their shared neurological basis, it appears that music and language evolved together as brain size increased over the course of hominid evolution. But the primacy of language over music that we can observe today suggests that language, not music, was the primary function natural selection operated on. Music, it would seem, had little adaptive value of its own, and most likely developed on the coattails of language.

Passage B

Darwin claimed that since “neither the enjoyment nor the capacity of producing musical notes are faculties of the least [practical] use to man...they must be ranked amongst the most mysterious with which he is endowed.” I suggest that the enjoyment of and the capacity to produce musical notes are faculties of indispensable use to mothers and their infants and that it is in the emotional bonds created by the interaction of mother and child that we can discover the evolutionary origins of human music.

Even excluding lullabies, which parents sing to infants, human mothers and infants under six months of age engage in ritualized, sequential behaviors, involving vocal, facial, and bodily interactions. Using face-to-face mother-infant interactions filmed at 24 frames per second, researchers have shown that mothers and infants jointly construct mutually improvised interactions in which each partner tracks the actions of the other. Such episodes last from one-half second to three seconds and are composed of musical elements—variations in pitch, rhythm, timbre, volume, and tempo.

What evolutionary advantage would such behavior have? In the course of hominid evolution, brain size increased rapidly. Contemporaneously, the increase in bipedality caused the birth canal to narrow. This resulted in hominid infants being born ever-more prematurely, leaving them much more helpless at birth.

This helplessness necessitated longer, better maternal care. Under such conditions, the emotional bonds created in the premusical mother-infant interactions we observe in Homo sapiens today—behavior whose neurological basis essentially constitutes the capacity to make and enjoy music—would have conferred considerable evolutionary advantage.

Each of the two passages mentions the relation of music to

• A. bonding between humans
• B. human emotion
• C. neurological research
• D. the increasing helplessness of hominid infants
• E. the use of tools to produce sounds

PT June 2007, Sec 4, Q10

The two passages discuss recent scientific research on music. They are adapted from two different papers presented at a scholarly conference.

Passage A

Did music and human language originate separately or together? Both systems use intonation and rhythm to communicate emotions. Both can be produced vocally or with tools, and people can produce both music and language silently to themselves.

Brain imaging studies suggest that music and language are part of one large, vastly complicated, neurological system for processing sound. In fact, fewer differences than similarities exist between the neurological processing of the two. One could think of the two activities as different radio programs that can be broadcast over the same hardware. One noteworthy difference, though, is that, generally speaking, people are better at language than music. In music, anyone can listen easily enough, but most people do not perform well, and in many cultures composition is left to specialists. In language, by contrast, nearly everyone actively performs and composes.

Given their shared neurological basis, it appears that music and language evolved together as brain size increased over the course of hominid evolution. But the primacy of language over music that we can observe today suggests that language, not music, was the primary function natural selection operated on. Music, it would seem, had little adaptive value of its own, and most likely developed on the coattails of language.

Passage B

Darwin claimed that since “neither the enjoyment nor the capacity of producing musical notes are faculties of the least [practical] use to man...they must be ranked amongst the most mysterious with which he is endowed.” I suggest that the enjoyment of and the capacity to produce musical notes are faculties of indispensable use to mothers and their infants and that it is in the emotional bonds created by the interaction of mother and child that we can discover the evolutionary origins of human music.

Even excluding lullabies, which parents sing to infants, human mothers and infants under six months of age engage in ritualized, sequential behaviors, involving vocal, facial, and bodily interactions. Using face-to-face mother-infant interactions filmed at 24 frames per second, researchers have shown that mothers and infants jointly construct mutually improvised interactions in which each partner tracks the actions of the other. Such episodes last from one-half second to three seconds and are composed of musical elements—variations in pitch, rhythm, timbre, volume, and tempo.

What evolutionary advantage would such behavior have? In the course of hominid evolution, brain size increased rapidly. Contemporaneously, the increase in bipedality caused the birth canal to narrow. This resulted in hominid infants being born ever-more prematurely, leaving them much more helpless at birth.

This helplessness necessitated longer, better maternal care. Under such conditions, the emotional bonds created in the premusical mother-infant interactions we observe in Homo sapiens today—behavior whose neurological basis essentially constitutes the capacity to make and enjoy music—would have conferred considerable evolutionary advantage.

The authors would be most likely to agree on the answer to which one of the following questions regarding musical capacity in humans?

• A. Does it manifest itself in some form in early infancy?
• B. Does it affect the strength of mother-infant bonds?
• C. Is it at least partly a result of evolutionary increases in brain size?
• D. Did its evolution spur the development of new neurological systems?
• E. Why does it vary so greatly among different individuals?

PT June 2007, Sec 4, Q12

The two passages discuss recent scientific research on music. They are adapted from two different papers presented at a scholarly conference.

Passage A

Did music and human language originate separately or together? Both systems use intonation and rhythm to communicate emotions. Both can be produced vocally or with tools, and people can produce both music and language silently to themselves.

Brain imaging studies suggest that music and language are part of one large, vastly complicated, neurological system for processing sound. In fact, fewer differences than similarities exist between the neurological processing of the two. One could think of the two activities as different radio programs that can be broadcast over the same hardware. One noteworthy difference, though, is that, generally speaking, people are better at language than music. In music, anyone can listen easily enough, but most people do not perform well, and in many cultures composition is left to specialists. In language, by contrast, nearly everyone actively performs and composes.

Given their shared neurological basis, it appears that music and language evolved together as brain size increased over the course of hominid evolution. But the primacy of language over music that we can observe today suggests that language, not music, was the primary function natural selection operated on. Music, it would seem, had little adaptive value of its own, and most likely developed on the coattails of language.

Passage B

Darwin claimed that since “neither the enjoyment nor the capacity of producing musical notes are faculties of the least [practical] use to man...they must be ranked amongst the most mysterious with which he is endowed.” I suggest that the enjoyment of and the capacity to produce musical notes are faculties of indispensable use to mothers and their infants and that it is in the emotional bonds created by the interaction of mother and child that we can discover the evolutionary origins of human music.

Even excluding lullabies, which parents sing to infants, human mothers and infants under six months of age engage in ritualized, sequential behaviors, involving vocal, facial, and bodily interactions. Using face-to-face mother-infant interactions filmed at 24 frames per second, researchers have shown that mothers and infants jointly construct mutually improvised interactions in which each partner tracks the actions of the other. Such episodes last from one-half second to three seconds and are composed of musical elements—variations in pitch, rhythm, timbre, volume, and tempo.

What evolutionary advantage would such behavior have? In the course of hominid evolution, brain size increased rapidly. Contemporaneously, the increase in bipedality caused the birth canal to narrow. This resulted in hominid infants being born ever-more prematurely, leaving them much more helpless at birth.

This helplessness necessitated longer, better maternal care. Under such conditions, the emotional bonds created in the premusical mother-infant interactions we observe in Homo sapiens today—behavior whose neurological basis essentially constitutes the capacity to make and enjoy music—would have conferred considerable evolutionary advantage.

Which one of the following most accurately characterizes a relationship between the two passages?

• A. Passage A and passage B use different evidence to draw divergent conclusions.
• B. Passage A poses the question that passage B attempts to answer.
• C. Passage A proposes a hypothesis that passage B attempts to substantiate with new evidence.
• D. Passage A expresses a stronger commitment to its hypothesis than does passage B.
• E. Passage A and passage B use different evidence to support the same conclusion.

PT June 2007, Sec 4, Q14

Educator: Reducing class sizes in our school district would require hiring more teachers. However, there is already a shortage of qualified teachers in the region. Although students receive more individualized instruction when classes are smaller, education suffers when teachers are underqualified. Therefore, reducing class sizes in our district would probably not improve overall student achievement.

Which one of the following is an assumption required by the educator’s argument?

• A. Class sizes in the school district should be reduced only if doing so would improve overall student achievement.
• B. At least some qualified teachers in the school district would be able to improve the overall achievement of students in their classes if class sizes were reduced.
• C. Students place a greater value on having qualified teachers than on having smaller classes.
• D. Hiring more teachers would not improve the achievement of any students in the school district if most or all of the teachers hired were underqualified.
• E. Qualified teachers could not be persuaded to relocate in significant numbers to the educator’s region to take teaching jobs.

PT 65, Section 4, Q. 13

Geographer: Because tropical storms require heat and moisture, they form especially over ocean surfaces of at least 26 degrees Celsius (79 degrees Fahrenheit), ocean temperatures that global warming would encourage. For this reason, many early discussions of global warming predicted that it would cause more frequent and intense tropical storms. But recent research shows that this prediction is unlikely to be borne out. Other factors, such as instabilities in wind flow, are likely to counteract global warming’s effects on tropical storm development.

Which one of the following most accurately expresses the conclusion drawn in the geographer’s argument?

• A. Tropical storms are especially likely to form over warm ocean surfaces.
• B. Contrary to early discussions, global warming is not the only factor affecting the frequency and intensity of tropical storms.
• C. If global warming were reversed, tropical storms would be less frequent and less intense.
• D. Instabilities in wind flow will negate the effect of global warming on the formation of tropical storms.
• E. Global warming probably will not produce more frequent and intense tropical storms.

PT 65, Section 4, Q. 14

Critic to economist: In yet another of your bumbling forecasts, last year you predicted that this country’s economy would soon go into recession if current economic policies were not changed. Instead, economic growth is even stronger this year.

Economist: There was nothing at all bumbling about my warning. Indeed, it convinced the country’s leaders to change economic policies, which is what prevented a recession.

The economist responds to the critic by

• A. indicating that the state of affairs on which the economist’s prediction was conditioned did not obtain
• B. distinguishing between a prediction that has not yet turned out to be correct and one that has turned out to be incorrect
• C. attempting to show that the critic’s statements are mutually inconsistent
• D. offering a particular counterexample to a general claim asserted by the critic
• E. offering evidence against one of the critic’s factual premises

PT 65, Section 4, Q. 16

Lutsina: Because futuristic science fiction does not need to represent current social realities, its writers can envisage radically new social arrangements. Thus it has the potential to be a richer source of social criticism than is conventional fiction.

Priscilla: That futuristic science fiction writers more skillfully envisage radically new technologies than new social arrangements shows how writers’ imaginations are constrained by current realities. Because of this limitation, the most effective social criticism results from faithfully presenting the current social realities for critical examination, as happens in conventional fiction.

Lutsina and Priscilla disagree with each other about

• A. some science fiction writers have succeeded in envisaging convincing, radically new social arrangements
• B. writers of conventional fiction are more skillful than are writers of futuristic science fiction
• C. futuristic science fiction has more promise as a source of social criticism than does conventional fiction
• D. envisaging radically new technologies rather than radically new social arrangements is a shortcoming of futuristic science fiction
• E. criticism of current social arrangements is not effective when those arrangements are contrasted with radically different ones

PT 65, Section 4, Q. 25