Reading ComprehensionDifficulty: Hard

PT7 S3 P1 Q5 Explanation

Working Mothers

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

TopicsInferenceSociety

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Passage

The labor force is often organized as if workers had no family responsibilities. Preschool-age children need full-time care; children in primary school need care after school and during school vacations. Although day care services can resolve some scheduling conflicts between home and office, workers cannot always find or afford suitable care. Even especially when combined with unavoidable household duties, are too inflexible for parents with primary child-care responsibility.

Although a small but increasing number of working men are single parents, those barriers against successful participation in the labor market that are related to primary child-care responsibilities mainly disadvantage women. Even in families where both parents work, cultural pressures on fathers to bear the primary child-rearing responsibilities.

In reconciling child-rearing responsibilities with participation in the labor market, many working mothers are forced to make compromises. For example, approximately one-third of all working mothers are employed only part-time, even though part-time jobs are dramatically underpaid and often less desirable in comparison to full-time employment. Even though part-time work is usually their family duties, but only at the expense of the advantages associated with full-time employment.

Moreover, even mothers with full-time employment must compromise opportunities in order to adjust to barriers against parents in the labor market. Many choose jobs entailing little challenge or responsibility or those offering flexible scheduling, often available only in poorly paid positions, while other working mothers, although willing and able to assume as be allocated on the basis of gender, women will be seriously disadvantaged in that labor market.

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
5.

The passage suggests that day care is at best a limited solution to the pressures associated with child rearing for all of

Answer choices

  1. Supported20% picked this

    Even the best day care available cannot guarantee that children will have meaningful time

    The second to last sentence of the first paragraph is making this point. Even if you can afford to put your kid in daycare all day while you work, it's still bad that you're never getting to see your kid, other than picking them up from daycare, feeding them, and putting them to bed.

  2. Supported10% picked this

    Some parents cannot afford day care

    This is supported by the 3rd sentence of the passage: workers cannot always find or afford suitable day care.

  3. Supported7% picked this

    Working parents sometimes have difficulty finding suitable day care for

    This is supported by the 3rd sentence of the passage: workers cannot always find or afford suitable day care.

  4. Correct59% picked this

    Parents who send their children to day care still need to provide care for their

    Why this is right

    The passage starts off by saying that working parents need to figure out how their kids are going to be taken care of: - if the kid is younger than 5, then they need full-time care - if the kid is 5 or older, then they're in school for part of the day, but they need care after school. School-aged kids also need full-time care during summer vacation from school. This answer is talking about parents needing day care when the parents are on vacation. That's never discussed. Although it's blissful to travel without your kids, you can presumably take your kids with you when you're on vacation.

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

  5. Supported3% picked this

    Even children who are in day care may have to stay home when

    This is supported by the 4th sentence of the passage: Even when they obtain such care, parents must still cope with emergencies, such as illnesses, that keep children at home.

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