Reasoning Test 18

LSAT

Reasoning Test 18

LSAT 18 SECTION III

Time35 minutes 26 Questions

Directions: Each passage in this section is followed by a group of questions to be answered on the basis of what is stated or implied in the passage. For some of the questions, more than one of the choices could conceivably answer the question. However, you are to choose the best answer, that is, the response that most accurately and completely answers the question, and blacken the corresponding space on your answer sheet.

The fairness of the judicial process depends on the objective presentation of facts to an impartial jury made up of one’s peers. Present the facts, and you have a fair trial. However, fact-finding, especially for interpersonal disagreements, is not so straightforward and is often contaminated by variables that reach beyond the legal domain.

A trial is an attempt to transport jurors to the time and place of the disputed event, to recreate the disputed event, or at least to explain that event with maximum accuracy. A trial falls short of (fall short of: v.达不到, 不符合)this goal, however, because it presents selected witnesses who recite selected portions of their respective memories concerning selected observations of the disputed event. These multiple selections are referred to as the abstraction process. Limitations in both perception and memory are responsible for the fact that the remembered event contains only a fraction of the detail present during the actual event, and the delay between observation and recitation causes witnesses’ memories to lose even more of the original perceptions. During the course of a trial, a witness’s recitation of the now-abstracted events may reflect selected disclosure based on his or her attitudes and motivations surrounding that testimony. Furthermore, the incidents reported are dependent on the lines of inquiry established by the attorneys involved. Accordingly, the recited data are a fraction of the remembered data, which are a fraction of the observed data, which are a fraction of the total data for the event.

After the event that led to the trial has been abstracted by participants in the trial, jurors are expected to resolve factual issues. Some of the jurors’ conclusions are based on facts that were directly recited; others are found inferentially. Here another abstraction process takes place. Discussions during deliberations(评议，审议) add to the collective pool of recalled evidentiary perceptions; nonetheless, the jurors’ abstraction processes further reduce the number of characteristics traceable to the original event.

Complication can arise from (arise from: 起于,由...出身) false abstractions at each stage. Studies have shown that witnesses recall having perceived incidents that are known to be absent from a given event. Conversely, jurors can remember hearing evidence that is unaccounted for in court transcripts. Explanations for these phenomena range from bias through prior conditioning or observer expectation to faulty reportage of the event based on the constraints of language. Aberrant abstractions in perception or recollection may not be conscious or deliberate, but reliability is nevertheless diluted.

Finally, deliberate untruthfulness has always been recognized as a risk of testimonial evidence. Such intentionally false abstractions, however, are only a small part of the inaccuracies produced by the abstraction process.

1.In this passage, the author’s main purpose is to

(A) discuss a process that jeopardizes the fairness of jury trials

(B) analyze a methodology that safeguards the individual’s right to fair trial

(D) defend the trial-by-jury process, despite its limitations（A）

(E) point out the unavoidable abuses that have crept into the judicial process

2.The author considers all of the following obstacles to a fair trial EXCEPT

(A) selective perceptions

(B) faulty communications

(D) intentional falsifications（E）

(E) too few abstractions

3.The author would most likely agree that the abstraction process occurs in the judicial process primarily because

(A) some jurors’ conclusions are based on facts rather than on inferences

(B) remembered events depend upon an individual’s emotions

(D) it is difficult to distinguish between deliberate falsehood and unintentional selected disclosure（C）

(E) witnesses often dispute one another’s recollections of events

4.It can be inferred that the author believes the ability of juries to resolve factual issues is

(A) limited by any individual juror’s tendency to draw inferences from the facts presented during the trial

(B) overwhelmed by the collective pool of recalled evidentiary perceptions

(D) dependent upon the jury’s ability to understand the influence of the abstraction process on testimony（E）

(E) subject to the same limitations of perception and memory that affect witnesses

5.With which one of the following statements would the author most likely agree?

(A) If deliberate untruthfulness were all the courts had to contend with, jury trials would be fairer than they are today.

(B) Lack of moral standards is more of an impediment to a fair trial than human frailty.

(C) The bulk of the inaccuracies produced by the abstraction process are innocently presented and rarely have any serious consequences.

(D) If the inaccuracies resulting from the abstraction process persist, the present trial-by-jury system is likely to become a thing of the past.（A）

(E) Once intentional falsification of evidence is eliminated from trials, ensuring an accurate presentation of facts will easily follow.

6.The author’s attitude toward the abstraction process that occurs when witnesses testify in a trial can best be described as

(A) confident that witnesses can be conditioned to overcome many limitations of memory

(B) concerned that it may undermine witnesses ability to accurately describe the original event in dispute

(D) indifferent toward the effect the abstraction process has on testimony（B）

(E) suspicious of witnesses’ efforts to describe remembered events truthfully

7.Given the information in the passage, the actual event that is disputed in a jury trial is most like

(A) a group of job applicants that is narrowed down to a few finalists

(B) a subject that is photographed from varied and increasingly distant vantage points

(D) a puzzle that is unsystematically assembled through trial and error（B）

(E) a lie that is compounded by additional lies in order to be maintained

A medical article once pointed with great alarm to an increase in cancer among milk drinkers. Cancer, it seems, was becoming increasingly frequent in New England, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Switzerland, where a lot of milk is produced and consumed, while remaining rare in Ceylon, where milk is scarce. For further evidence it was pointed out that cancer was less frequent in some states of the southern United States where less milk was consumed. Also, it was pointed out, milk-drinking English women get some kinds of cancer eighteen times as frequently as Japanese women who seldom drink milk.

A little digging might uncover quite a number of ways to account for these figures, but one factor is enough by itself to show them up. Cancer is predominantly a disease that strikes in middle life or after. Switzerland and the states of the United States mentioned first are alike in having populations with relatively long spans of life. English women at the time the study was made were living an average of twelve years longer than Japanese women.

Professor Helen M. Walker has worked out an amusing illustration of the folly in assuming there must be cause and effect whenever two things vary together. In investigating the relationship between age and some physical characteristics of women, begin by measuring the angle of the feet in walking. You will find that the angle tends to be greater among older women. You might first consider whether this indicates that women grow older because they toe out, and you can see immediately that this is ridiculous. So it appears that age increases the angle between the feet, and most women must come to toe out more as they grow older.

Any such conclusion is probably false and certainly unwarranted. You could only reach it legitimately by studying the same women—orpossibly equivalent groups—overa period of time. That would eliminate the factor responsible here, which is that the older women grew up at a time when a young lady was taught to toe out in walking, while the members of the younger group were learning posture in a day when that was discouraged.

When you find somebody—usually an interested party—making a fuss about a correlation, look first of all (first of all: adv.首先) to see if it is not one of this type, produced by the stream of events, the trend of the times. In our time it is easy to show a positive correlation (positive correlation: 正相关)between any pair of things like these: number of students in college, number of inmates in mental institutions, consumption of cigarettes, incidence of heart disease, use of X-ray machines, production of false teeth, salaries of California school teachers, profits of Nevada gambling halls. To call some one of these the cause of some other is manifestly silly. But it is done every day.

8.The author’s conclusion about the relationship between age and the ways women walk indicates he believes that

(A) toeing out is associated with aging

(B) toeing out is fashionable with the younger generation

(D) studying equivalent groups proves that toeing out increases with age（C）

(E) studying the same women over a period of time proves that toeing out increases with age

9.The author describes the posited relationship between toeing out and age (lines 29-40) in order to

(A) illustrate a folly

(B) show how social attitudes toward posture change

(D) illustrate a medical problem（A）

(E) offer a method to determine a woman’s age from her footprints

10.Given the author’s statements in the passage, his advice for evaluating statistics that show a high positive correlation between two conditions could include all the following statements EXCEPT

(A) look for an explanation in the stream of events

(B) consider some trend of the times as the possible cause of both conditions

(D) determine which of the two conditions is the cause and which is the effect（D）

(E) decide whether the conclusions have been reached legitimately and the appropriate groupings have been made

11.Assume that there is a high statistical correlation between college attendance and individual earnings. Given this, the author would most probably agree with which one of the following statements about the cause-effect relationship between college attendance and income?

(A) Someone’s potential earnings may be affected by other variables, like wealth or intelligence, that are also associated with college attendance.

(B) Someone who attends graduate school will be rich.

(D) Someone who attends college will earn more money than someone who does not attend college.（A）

(E) Someone who attends college will earn more money only because she does attend college.

12.According to the author, Professor Walker believes that

(A) women who toe out age more rapidly than women who do not

(B) most women toe out as they grow older because age increases the angle between the feet

(D) toeing out is the reason why women grow old（C）

(E) a causal relationship must exist whenever two things vary together

13.The author would reject all the following statements about cause-effect relationships as explanations for the statistics that show an increase in cancer rates EXCEPT that the

(A) Ceylonesedrink more milk than the English

(B) Swiss produce and consume large quantities of dairy products

(D) People of Wisconsin have relatively high life expectancies（D）

(E) People who live in some states of the southern United States have relatively high life expectancies

14.How would the author be most likely to explain the correlation between the “salaries of California school teachers [and the] profits of Nevada gambling halls” (Lines 63-64)?

(A) There is a positive correlation that is probably due to California teachers’ working in Las Vegas on weekends to increase both their salaries and increase both their salaries and Nevada’s gambling profits.

(B) There is a positive correlation that is probably linked to general economic trends, but no direct causal relationship exists.

(C) There is a negative correlation that is probably linked to general economic trends, but no direct causal relationship exists.

(D) There is a negative correlation because the element that controls Las Vegas gambling probably has agents in the California school system.（B）

(E) The author would deny the existence of any correlation whatsoever.

In most developed countries, men have higher salaries, on average, than women. Much of the salary differential(difference between comparable individuals or classes)results from the tendency of women to be in lower-paying occupations. The question of whether this occupational employment pattern can be attributed to sex discrimination is a complex one. In fact, wage differentials among occupations are the norm rather than the exception. Successful athletes commonly earn more than Nobel Prize-winning academics; gifted artists often cannot earn enough to survive, while mediocre investment bankers prosper. Given such differences, the question naturally arises: talent and ability being equal, why does anyone—man or woman—enter a low-paying occupation? One obvious answer is personal choice. An individual may prefer, for example, to teach math at a modest salary rather than to become a more highly paid electrical engineer.

Some people argue that personal choice also explains sex-related wage differentials. According to this explanation, many women, because they place a high priority on parenting(parenting: n. （父母对子女的）养育)and performing household services, choose certain careers in which they are free to enter and leave the work force with minimum penalty. They may choose to acquire skills, such as typing and salesclerking, that do not depreciate rapidly with temporary absences from the work force. They may avoid occupational specialties that require extensive training periods, long and unpredictable hours, and willingness to relocate, all of which make specialization in domestic activities problematic. By choosing to invest less in developing their career potential and to expend less effort outside the home, women must, according to this explanation, pay a price in the form of lower salaries. But women cannot be considered the victims of discrimination because they prefer the lower-paying occupations to higher-paying ones.

An alternative explanation for sex-related wage differentials is that women do not voluntarily choose lower-paying occupations but are forced into them by employers and social prejudices. According to proponents of this view, employers who discriminate may refuse to hire qualified women for relatively high-paying occupations. More generally, subtle society-wide prejudices may induce women to avoid certain occupations in favor of others that are considered more suitable. Indeed, the “choice” of women to specialize in parenting and performing household services may itself result from these subtle prejudices. Whether the discrimination is by employers in a particular occupation or by society as a whole is irrelevant; the effect will be the same. Further, if such discrimination does occur, women excluded from certain occupations will flood others, and this increase in supply will have a depressing effect on wages in occupations dominated by women.

15.Which one of the following is the best little for the passage?

(A) Wage Differentials Between Men and Women

(B) Women in Low-Paying Occupations: Do They Have a Choice?

(D) The Role of Social Prejudice in Women’s Careers（B）

(E) Home vs. Office: how Does the Modern Woman Choose?

16.In stating that “Successful athletes commonly earn more than Nobel Prize-winning academics” (lines 10-11), the author’s primary purpose is to

(A) demonstrate that education has little to do with making money

(B) suggest that people with talent and ability should not enter low-paying occupations

(D) imply that a person can be successful and still not make much money（E）

(E) give an example of how certain occupations are better paid than others regardless of inherent worth or talent required