LSAT Main Point / Primary Purpose

For decades, urban planners treated the postwar housing developments built on the outskirts of mid-sized American cities as cautionary tales — sprawling, car-dependent, and socially isolating. Recent work by sociologist Devon Alarie complicates this verdict. Drawing on oral histories collected from residents who moved into the Linden Heights development in 1952, Alarie shows that early residents constructed dense informal networks of mutual aid: shared childcare arrangements, rotating tool libraries, and weekly potluck gatherings that persisted for nearly two decades. These networks, Alarie argues, did not arise despite the development's design but were partly enabled by it — uniform lot sizes, shared front-yard sightlines, and the absence of established hierarchies among newcomers all lowered the social cost of initiating contact with neighbors. Alarie is careful, however, not to romanticize Linden Heights. She acknowledges that the same uniformity that fostered cohesion also enforced exclusion: the development's restrictive covenants barred Black families until 1968, and the informal networks she documents were, in their early years, racially homogeneous by design. Moreover, Alarie's evidence shows that the dense networks weakened sharply once a second wave of residents arrived in the 1970s, suggesting that the conditions producing solidarity were historically specific rather than inherent to the built form. What Alarie's study most usefully unsettles, then, is not the critique of postwar suburbia but a particular version of it — the version that treats suburban form as directly producing social atomization. Her findings suggest that built environments shape social possibility but do not determine social outcome; the same physical layout supported intense neighborly cooperation in one decade and quiet disengagement in another. Future scholarship, she contends, should attend to the demographic, economic, and historical conditions under which a given built form yields one social pattern rather than another, rather than reading social consequences directly off design features.

Which of the following most accurately expresses the main point of the passage?

• A Postwar suburban developments such as Linden Heights produced stronger communities than urban planners have traditionally recognized.
• B Alarie's oral histories of Linden Heights residents demonstrate that mutual-aid networks in the 1950s were enabled by features of the development's physical design.
• C Alarie's research on Linden Heights challenges the view that suburban form directly produces social atomization, arguing instead that built environments enable but do not determine social outcomes. ✓ Correct
• D The exclusionary covenants attached to postwar suburban developments meant that any social cohesion they produced was achieved at the cost of racial homogeneity.
• E Scholars studying the social effects of built environments must abandon design-based explanations in favor of demographic and economic ones.
• F placeholder

When ornithologist Fei Liu first proposed in 2009 that the foraging behavior of the Pacific blackcap warbler should be classified as tool use, the suggestion met sharp resistance. Critics argued that the warbler's habit of wedging seed pods between rock fissures to crack them open lacked the deliberate manipulation that defines tool use in primates and corvids. The seed pod, they contended, was not held, shaped, or repositioned; it was merely placed. Liu's recent monograph addresses these objections directly, and in doing so it does something more interesting than simply defending her original claim. Liu now argues that the persistent debate over whether the warbler qualifies reveals a deeper problem with the prevailing definition of tool use itself. That definition, drawn largely from primatology in the 1970s, treats deliberate manipulation as the essential criterion. But Liu shows that this criterion was never derived from cross-species comparison; it was assumed from the outset, on the basis of a small set of charismatic species. When applied to species with different morphologies — birds with beaks rather than hands, for instance — the criterion produces classifications that track anatomy more than cognition. Liu does not propose a replacement definition. Her aim is more modest: to show that the existing criterion is parochial, and that any future definition will need to be built from a wider taxonomic base. She is willing to remain agnostic, for now, about whether the warbler is a tool user, provided readers concede that the question cannot be settled by a definition designed without species like the warbler in mind.

The primary purpose of the passage is to

• A defend Liu's 2009 claim that the Pacific blackcap warbler should be classified as a tool user
• B describe the methodology Liu used to study the foraging behavior of the Pacific blackcap warbler
• C summarize the debate within ornithology over whether bird behaviors should count as tool use
• D explain how Liu's recent work shifts the focus of debate from the warbler's status to the adequacy of the prevailing definition of tool use ✓ Correct
• E argue that the prevailing definition of tool use should be replaced with one derived from a wider taxonomic base
• F placeholder

The conventional account of the 1887 newspaper strike in the river city of Aldermont treats the dispute as a straightforward conflict between typesetters demanding higher piece-rates and publishers determined to hold the line on costs. Historian Tomas Eberhardt's recent reconstruction, drawing on previously overlooked union meeting minutes and publishers' private correspondence, suggests that this framing obscures more than it reveals. Eberhardt finds that the wage demand functioned, for both sides, as a proxy for a different and largely unspoken contest: control over the pace and sequencing of the typesetting workday. Publishers had begun, in the months before the strike, to introduce informal supervisory practices — floor walkers timing setters' output, posted comparisons of individual productivity — that the typesetters experienced as more threatening than the wage stagnation itself. The wage demand, Eberhardt argues, was the issue the union felt it could publicly defend; the supervisory practices were harder to articulate as a grievance and would have struck the public as resistance to ordinary management. Eberhardt is not the first historian to suggest that nineteenth-century labor disputes often turned on unspoken issues, but his contribution is to show, in unusually fine-grained detail, how the public framing of a single strike was deliberately constructed by both parties to keep the deeper conflict offstage. The publishers, for their part, were equally invested in keeping the supervisory question out of the negotiations: any public concession on workplace control would, they feared, set a damaging precedent across the regional press. The result was a strike that both sides fought hard but neither side described accurately, and a settlement — eventual restoration of pre-strike wages with no formal agreement on supervisory practices — that left the underlying conflict unresolved and resurfacing repeatedly over the following decade.

Which of the following most accurately expresses the main point of the passage?

• A The 1887 Aldermont newspaper strike was caused primarily by publishers' introduction of supervisory practices rather than by disputes over wages.
• B Eberhardt's research demonstrates that nineteenth-century labor historians have systematically underestimated the role of workplace control in labor disputes.
• C Eberhardt argues that the 1887 Aldermont strike's apparent wage dispute masked a deeper, mutually concealed conflict over workplace supervision, leaving that conflict unresolved by the settlement. ✓ Correct
• D The settlement of the 1887 Aldermont strike failed to address its underlying causes and therefore led to recurring labor unrest in the regional press over the following decade.
• E Eberhardt's use of previously overlooked union minutes and publishers' correspondence has substantially revised the historical understanding of late-nineteenth-century labor disputes.
• F placeholder