LSAT Comparative Passages: Agreement

For decades, urban planners treated street trees primarily as aesthetic features — pleasant additions to a streetscape but secondary to the engineered functions of roads, drainage, and sidewalks. The recent literature on urban canopy science has overturned that hierarchy. Trees moderate surface temperatures during heat waves, intercept stormwater that would otherwise overwhelm drains, and capture particulate pollution from traffic. In neighborhoods with mature canopy, summer pavement temperatures can run ten to fifteen degrees cooler than in canopy-poor areas a few blocks away. These benefits are not evenly distributed: lower-income districts in most North American cities have markedly less canopy than wealthier ones, a pattern that compounds existing inequities in heat exposure and respiratory health. The policy implication is that municipal tree planting should be treated as core public-health infrastructure, with funding streams and performance metrics comparable to those used for water mains or transit, rather than as discretionary beautification. Maintenance, not just planting, must be funded over a tree's full lifespan if the public-health gains are to be realized.

The authors of the two passages would be most likely to agree on which one of the following statements?

• A Municipal tree-planting programs are the most cost-effective public-health investment available to cities facing rising summer temperatures.
• B The cooling and air-quality benefits attributed to urban trees in the scientific literature are largely realized only by mature, surviving specimens rather than by saplings. ✓ Correct
• C Funding for urban canopy should be redirected to reflective roofing and shaded transit infrastructure in lower-income districts.
• D Municipal planners have historically overestimated the aesthetic value of street trees relative to their engineering functions.
• E Heat exposure and air-quality burdens fall disproportionately on lower-income urban neighborhoods regardless of which mitigation strategy a city adopts.

Recent work in evolutionary developmental biology has revived interest in what nineteenth-century naturalists called 'deep homology' — the idea that strikingly different anatomical structures across distant lineages can be built using the same ancient regulatory genes. The eyes of a fruit fly and a vertebrate, for instance, look almost nothing alike at the tissue level, yet both are switched on during development by genes in the Pax6 family. Researcher Marta Reyes argues that such findings should reshape how biology textbooks describe convergent evolution. What looks like independent invention of similar solutions, she contends, often turns out to be the same toolkit being redeployed in different morphological contexts. Convergence at the level of finished anatomy can mask conservation at the level of underlying genetic machinery. The deeper one looks into developmental regulation, Reyes maintains, the more biology resembles improvisation on a small set of inherited themes rather than repeated independent invention.

It can be inferred that both authors would agree with which one of the following claims about Pax6?

• A The Pax6 family has been retained across distant animal lineages and participates in eye development in both fruit flies and vertebrates. ✓ Correct
• B The Pax6 evidence demonstrates that fruit fly and vertebrate eyes share a common evolutionary origin at the level of finished anatomy.
• C Most cases formerly described as convergent evolution are better understood as instances of deep homology operating through Pax6-like regulators.
• D The interpretive significance attributed to Pax6 in the recent literature has outrun what the underlying genetic evidence will support.
• E Biology textbooks should be revised to deemphasize convergent evolution in favor of an account centered on conserved regulatory genes.

The doctrine of stare decisis — that courts should ordinarily follow their prior decisions — is often defended on the ground that it secures predictability for citizens and businesses arranging their affairs in the shadow of the law. Legal historian Aleksy Borowski argues that this rationale, while genuine, is overstated. Most ordinary citizens never read judicial opinions; the predictability that matters to them is supplied by statutes, regulatory guidance, and the routinized conduct of officials they encounter, not by appellate doctrine. Where stare decisis does serious work, Borowski contends, is in disciplining judges themselves: it constrains the natural impulse of any decisionmaker to refight settled questions and forces a court to articulate a public-facing reason whenever it departs from precedent. The doctrine is, in this view, primarily an instrument of judicial humility and only secondarily a service to the public's planning needs.

The two authors would be most likely to agree on which one of the following statements about stare decisis?

• A The doctrine's primary value lies in disciplining judicial decisionmaking rather than in serving the planning needs of ordinary citizens. ✓ Correct
• B Sophisticated commercial actors rely on judicial precedent more closely than ordinary citizens do.
• C The reliance interests of citizens are an essentially fictional justification for stare decisis and should be abandoned by courts.
• D Stare decisis should be applied more strictly in commercial cases than in cases involving ordinary citizens.
• E Courts that depart from precedent without offering a public-facing explanation are violating the core purpose of the doctrine.