Reading ComprehensionDifficulty: Hard

PT130 S2 P2 Q13 Explanation

Philip Emeagwali

A free, expert breakdown of this official LSAT Reading Comprehension question.

TopicsInferenceScience

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Passage

This passage was adapted from articles published in

The success that Nigerian-born computer scientist Philip Emeagwali (b. 1954) has had in designing computers that solve real-world problems has been fueled by his willingness to reach beyond established paradigms and draw inspiration for his designs from nature. In the 1980s, Emeagwali achieved breakthroughs in the design of parallel computer systems. Whereas supercomputers worked sequentially, they were too slow and inefficient to accurately predict such extremely complex movements.

To model oil field flow using a computer requires the simulation of the distribution of the oil at tens of thousands of locations throughout the field. At each location, hundreds of simultaneous calculations must be made at regular time intervals relating to such variables as temperature, direction of oil flow, viscosity, and gather and broadcast the largest quantity of messages to its processing points in the shortest time.

In 1996 Emeagwali had another breakthrough when he presented the design for a massively parallel computer that he claims will be powerful enough to predict global weather patterns a century in advance. The computer’s design is based on the geometry of bees’ honeycombs, which use an extremely efficient three-dimensional spacing. Emeagwali believes understand the systems evolved by nature and, thereby, to facilitate the evolution of human technology.

What this question is testing

Inference

Your task

Find what must be true based on what the passage or stimulus states.

Common trap

Answers that are plausible or likely but not actually guaranteed by the text.

Winning move

Keep only the choice the statements fully support — eliminate anything that requires an extra assumption.

Reading along? Open the full official question in LawHub — we show a fragment here and keep the reasoning in our own words.

The question
13.

It can be inferred from the passage that one of the reasons massively parallel computers had not been used to model oil field flow

Answer choices

  1. Opposite5% picked this

    supercomputers are sufficiently powerful to handle most computational problems, including most problems arising

    We were told at the end of the first paragraph that supercomputers were not up to the job.

  2. No Support: not yet considered37% picked this

    the possibility of using a network of smaller computers to solve computationally difficult problems had

    This is certainly something we might speculate, but we don't have any line reference to go off of. The passage doesn't indicate that Emeagwali was the first person to even consider using a network of smaller computers to solve a difficult problem.

  3. Out of Scope: general public aware1% picked this

    the general public was not yet aware of the existence or vast capabilities

    We know that E used the Internet to connect more than 65,000 computers, but we don't know if this involved harnessing the general public's awareness of the existence / capabilities of the Internet. So we can't support the idea that lack of awareness on the part of the general public was previously an obstacle.

  4. Out of Scope: hadn't perceived need1% picked this

    oil companies had not yet perceived the need for modeling the flow of oil

    This is not only unsupported, but it's not a very plausible notion. It's hard to imagine that oil companies didn't see the need / value in being able to predict the flow of oil in subterranean fields.

  5. Correct56% picked this

    smaller computers can interfere with one another when they are connected together in parallel to solve

    Why this is right

    The reason LSAC will let us speculate that this is what was holding people back prior to 1989 is that the passage explicitly says that one of the great difficulties of parallel computing is figuring out how to divide up the tasks so that individual computers don't interfere with each other. E's signature insight (using the mathematics of tree-branching) was the way we moved past this problem, so prior to his insight, we were stymied by this problem.

    Skill tested: Inference · how this choice captures the passage's function is the move to repeat next time.

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