Reading ComprehensionDifficulty: Medium

PT2 S1 P2 Q11 Explanation

Stilgoe's Railroads

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

TopicsInferenceSociety

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Passage

Historians generally agree that, of the great modern innovations, the railroad had the most far-reaching impact on major events in the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly on the Industrial Revolution. There is, however, considerable disagreement among cultural historians regarding public attitudes toward the railroad, both at its the decades after 1880. But the argument he provides in support of this position is unconvincing.

What Stilgoe calls “romantic-era distrust” was in fact the reaction of a minority of writers, artists, and intellectuals who distrusted the railroad not so much for what it was as for what it signified. Thoreau and Hawthorne appreciated, even admired, an improved means of moving things and people from one place to a reaction against the prevailing attitude in the 1830s that the railroad was an unqualified improvement.

Stilgoe’s assertion that the ambivalence toward the railroad exhibited by writers like Hawthorne and Thoreau disappeared after the 1880s is also misleading. In support of this thesis, Stilgoe has unearthed an impressive volume of material, the work of hitherto unknown illustrators, journalists, and novelists, all devotees of the railroad; but it is 1830s and the minority of intellectual dissenters during that period extended into the 1880s and beyond.

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
11.

Which one of the following can be inferred from the passage regarding the work of Frank Norris, Eugene

Answer choices

  1. Trap4% picked this

    Their work never achieved broad popular

    Unrelated to Goal Out of Scope: broad appeal We don't know anything about these three writers other than that they are examples of people who were initially against railroads but later were in favor of them. So we can't comment on whether their work achieved broad popular appeal.

  2. Trap3% picked this

    Their ideas were disseminated to a large audience by the popular culture of

    Unrelated to Goal Out of Scope: broad appeal This is the flipside of (A). We don't know anything about these three writers other than that they are examples of people who were initially against railroads but later were in favor of them. So we can't comment on whether their work achieved broad popular appeal (i.e. whether it was disseminated to a large audience).

  3. Correct79% picked this

    Their work expressed a more positive attitude toward the railroad than did that of Henry James, Sinclair Lewis,

    Why this is right

    We knew that these three writers were examples of people who were initially against railroads but later were in favor of them. So we can say that their attitude toward railroads expressed more positivity than did the work of James / Lewis / Fitzgerald. Stilgoe was trying to convince his audience that by the 1880s, people had really embraced railroads. He refers to the work of James / Lewis / Fitzgerald, but our author is saying, "That's terrible evidence of a people embracing railroads. What comes through when we look at their writing is contrareity and ambivalence." They were either against railraods, mainly because everyone else was too eagerly in favor of them, or they were deeply ambivalent (seeing positives and negatives). Meanwhile, the author thinks that the work of Norris / O'Neill / Adams would better support Stilgoe's claim that by the 1880s the public's opinion of railroads had become much more positive, so their work clearly gives off a more positive evaluation of railraods.

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

  4. Trap0% picked this

    Although they were primarily novelists, some of their work could be

    Unrelated to Goal Out of Scope: primarily novelists We don't know anything about these three writers other than that they are examples of people who were initially against railroads but later were in favor of them. So we can't comment on whether they were primarily novelists or whether some of their work could be called journalism.

  5. Out of Scope: influenced by Thoreau14% picked this

    Although they were influenced by Thoreau, their attitude toward the railroad was significantly

    We can support the half of this saying that their attitude toward the railroad was different from Thoreau's, but we have no support for saying they were influenced by Thoreau.

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