Reading ComprehensionDifficulty: Medium

PT150 S1 P4 Q20 ExplanationEvolutionary Implications of Cooking

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

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Passage

It might reasonably have been expected that the adoption of cooking by early humans would not have led to any changes in human digestive anatomy. After all, cooking makes food easier to eat, which means that no special adaptations are required to process cooked food. However, current evidence suggests that humans today such efficiency, we suggest, led to an inability to survive on raw-food diets in the wild.

Important questions therefore arise concerning what limits the ability of humans to utilize raw food. The principal effect of cooking considered to date has been a reduction in tooth and jaw size over evolutionary time. Human tooth and jaw size show signs of decreasing approximately 100,000 years ago; we suggest that this may prove to result from later modifications in cooking technique, such as the adoption of boiling.

The evolution of soft parts of the digestive system is harder to reconstruct because they leave no fossil record. Human digestive anatomy differs from that of the other great apes in ways that have traditionally been explained as adaptations to a high raw-meat diet. Differences include the smaller gut volume, longer small meat. Testing between the cooking and raw-meat models for understanding human digestive anatomy is therefore warranted.

What this question is testing

Main Point

Your task

Capture the passage's overall primary point — the claim everything else supports.

Common trap

Answers that are true but too narrow (a single paragraph) or too broad (beyond the passage's scope).

Winning move

Summarize the whole passage in one sentence first, then match it to a choice.

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

The question
20.

Which one of the following most accurately states the main point of

Answer choices, explained

  1. Wrong Emphasis Last Thing Trap12% picked this

    Important questions about why humans are unable to survive on raw food are unresolved

    This answer tries to put too much weight on the last thing we read. Even though the passage does discuss lingering questions, its central thesis wasn't this wishy-washy. The authors want us to come away thinking, “the invention of cooking did lead to physiological changes that make us unable to live off raw food.”

  2. Correct79% picked this

    Current evidence suggests that human beings are biologically adapted to the ingestion of cooked rather

    Why this is right

    This certainly isn't the best encapsulation of the passage one could write, but of the available answers it has the best emphasis and scope. All we were looking for was an answer that sounded like, “learning to cook food changed us (our teeth, jaw, and possibly our guts) and now we can't eat raw food”. This answer touches on that causal claim by saying that we're biologically adapted to cooked food. The “current evidence” part allows us to match this up with all the tooth / jaw / soft digestive information in the last couple paragraphs.

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

  3. Too Broad: dietary habits6% picked this

    The reduction of human tooth and jaw size over evolutionary time strongly suggests that humans underwent a change

    If this answer ended, “strongly suggests that humans underwent adaptive changes because of the discovery of cooking”, it would be okay. The way this answer is written doesn't even clarify the cause/effect relationship. Did the reduction of tooth/jaw lead to changes in dietary habits or vice versa?

  4. Wrong Emphasis2% picked this

    For at least 250,000 years, humans have been eating a diet that heavily

    This answer makes it seem like the author's main point was just, “We sure have been cooking for a long time”, when the main point is, “Cooking changed our physical form to the point where we can't eat raw food any more.”

  5. Too Narrow2% picked this

    No special biological adaptations were necessary for humans to eat cooked food, since cooking makes

    This is said in the second sentence, but that's not the main point. We haven't even hit the first Purpose Pivot (“However”) in the third sentence at that point. The authors didn't write this passage to persuade us that you don't need a biological adaptation in order to eat cooked food. They wrote the passage to say “eating cooked food causes biological adaptations”.

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