Reading ComprehensionDifficulty: Medium

PT142 S3 P4 Q27 Explanation

The “Mexican American Generation”

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

TopicsInferenceSociety

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Passage

This passage is adapted from a review of book.

In a recent study, Mario García argues that in the United States between 1930 and 1960 the group of political activists he calls the “Mexican American Generation” was more radical and politically diverse than earlier historians have recognized. Through analysis of the work of some of the era’s most important scholars, García Chicanos of the 1960s and 1970s. His study, however, suffers from two flaws.

First, García’s analysis of the evidence he provides to demonstrate the Mexican American Generation’s political diversity is not entirely consistent. Indeed, he undermines his primary thesis by emphasizing an underlying consensus among various groups that tends to conceal the full significance of their differences. Groups such as the League of United Latin political history since 1930 has been characterized not by consensus but by intense and lively debate.

Second, García may be exaggerating the degree to which the views of these activists were representative of the ethnic Mexican population residing in the United States during this period. Noting that by 1930 the proportion of the Mexican American population that had been born in the United States had significantly increased, García in the United States necessarily resulted in an increase in the ethnic Mexican population’s political activism.

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
27.

The passage supports which one of the following statements about ethnic consciousness

Answer choices

  1. Unsupported Relationship4% picked this

    Ethnic consciousness increases when rates of Mexican immigration and

    The author doesn't clarify a specific relationship here. The author is saying that variables like immigration and naturalization rates help to create variables in ethnic consciousness, but we can't tell whether it's a positive relationship or an inverse one.

  2. Unsupported Relationship6% picked this

    Ethnic consciousness increases when the number of Mexican Americans born in the

    The author doesn't clarify a specific relationship here. The author is saying that you can't assume that as the number of MA's born in the US increases that MA's political activism will increase. But we don't have a direct link from political activism to ethnic consciousness.

  3. Unsupported Relationship6% picked this

    Ethnic consciousness decreases when the number of Mexican Americans assimilating into the culture of the

    The author doesn't clarify a specific relationship here. This answer sounds like a highly plausible one, but we can't find any line reference to support it. Ethnic consciousness is brought up in a very wishy-washy way, sort of just suggesting that its variability makes for messy inferences. Yet these first three answers all tried to create a very clean inference with ethnic consciousness that we just don't have any explicit support for.

  4. Unsupported Relationship11% picked this

    Variations in the influence of Mexican American leaders over the Mexican American population at large account in part

    The author only indicates that "variables such as patterns of bilingualism and rates of immigration and naturalization" create variation in ethnic consciousness. The passage doesn't connect variations in ethnic consciousness to variations in the influence of Mex-American leaders.

  5. Correct73% picked this

    Variations in rates of Mexican immigration and naturalization account in part for variations

    Why this is right

    That final sentence indicates that "variables such as patterns of bilingualism and rates of immigration and naturalization" create variation in ethnic consciousness. the variations in ethnic consciousness these variables help to create

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

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