Reading ComprehensionDifficulty: Hard

PT141 S3 P4 Q25 Explanation

Regulating Voluntary Risk

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

TopicsMeaning in ContextLaw

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Passage

It is generally believed that while in some cases government should intervene to protect people from risk—by imposing air safety standards, for example—in other cases, such as mountain climbing, the onus should be on the individual to protect himself or herself. In the eyes of the public at large, the demarcation between antecedent judgment of some other kind. They are thus of little utility in guiding policy decisions.

First, it is not easy to determine when a risk is voluntarily incurred. Although voluntariness may be entirely absent in the case of an unforeseeable collision with an asteroid, with most environmental, occupational, and other social risks, it is not an all-or-nothing matter, but rather one of degree. Risks incurred by airline part of a complex interaction, not the decision to fly, but the accident when it occurs.

Second, people often characterize risks as "voluntary” when they do not approve of the purpose for which people run the risks. It is unlikely that people would want to pour enormous taxpayer resources into lowering the risks associated with skydiving, even if the ratio of dollars spent to lives saved were quite policy should be guided by a better understanding of the factors that underlie judgments about voluntariness.

In general, the government should attempt to save as many lives as it can, subject to the limited public and private resources devoted to risk reduction. Departures from this principle should be justified not by invoking the allegedly voluntary or involuntary nature of a particular considerations for which notions of voluntariness serve as proxies.

What this question is testing

Meaning in Context

Your task

Pin down exactly what the question asks about the passage — a detail, the author's view, the structure, or the main point — before looking at the choices.

Common trap

Answers that restate a true detail from the passage but don't answer the specific question being asked.

Winning move

Anticipate the answer in your own words from the passage, then find the choice that matches that prediction.

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

The question
25.

The author’s use of the phrase “no special magic” is most likely meant primarily to convey that notions

Answer choices

  1. Out of Scope: exhaustively list15% picked this

    do not exhaustively characterize the risks that people

    The author is not complaining that a binary like voluntary / involuntary fails to encompass all cases. She's complaining that these notions don't have a clear dividing line, because the way people judge it is still connected to something else (like how important or frivolous that activity is).

  2. Out of Scope: intentionally conceal3% picked this

    have been used to intentionally conceal the factors motivating government efforts to protect

    The author is not saying that people use the terms voluntary and involuntary as a way to hide the truth. There's nothing conspiratorial about the author's summary here. She just thinks laypeople are subjective and inconsistent.

  3. Too Strong: no meaning9% picked this

    have no meaning beyond their literal,

    It's going overboard to say these notions have no meaning, just because they don't have an easy to define formula to them.

  4. Contradicted: mistakenly18% picked this

    are mistakenly believed to be characteristics that inform people's understanding of the

    The author isn't saying, "Some people think that people's understanding of risk is informed by notions like voluntary and involuntary. But they're wrong." Our author agrees that people's understanding of risk is informed by notions of voluntary and involuntary. In fact, in the second sentence of the passage, the author says that "in the eyes of the public at large, whether a risk is incurred voluntarily or involuntarily" is the main thing informing their judgment of whether or not the government should regulate this risk.

  5. Correct55% picked this

    provide a flawed mechanism for making public policy decisions relating to

    Why this is right

    We can see how this reinforces the author's local purpose (and the question stem does ask about purpose, because it says the author used "no special magic" primarily to convey what?) The sentence immediately following "no special magic" says, "Therefore ... regulatory policy should be guided by a better understanding", so the author is connecting the lack of consistency in the notions of voluntary / involuntary to how regulatory policy should be conducted. This is a callback to the last two sentences of the first paragraph. The second to last sentence is alluding to how "judgments of voluntary/involuntary frequently lie in an antecedent judgment of some other kind (such as whether skydiving or firefighting is frivolous or noble)" and "thus, they are of little utility in guiding policy decisions".

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

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