Reading Comprehension · Humanities
PrepTest 112 · Section 2 · Passage 2
Questions 7–14
Before you start
Open PrepTest 112, Section 2 in your official copy from LSAC and read the passage for Questions 7–14, using the structure guide below. The passage is not reprinted here.
Structure guide
- P1: reports a scholar's claim that an overlooked body of work matters, names the cause of the neglect, describes one group of specialists' blind spot, and gives a contrasting pair of examples
- P2: describes a second group of specialists and the scholar's criticism of their different blind spot, with supporting facts
- P3: the author explains why both limits are understandable, then concludes that each side gives a distorted picture
Step 2 · The kid passage
The Treehouse Notebooks
In her booklet about Grandpa's treehouse club, Aunt Rosa says the club's famous comic strips, drawn in plain words by Dot and Hank, are not the club's only treasure. Most of the club's serious work was written in Flipcode, a secret code, and she says those coded notebooks, full of go-kart plans and creek maps, were the club's greatest inventions.
But because people who study the club stick to their specialties, key notebooks sit unread. The code crackers decode only the riddles and jokes. They leave the plans and maps to the 'builders', who know wheels and axles but cannot read Flipcode. A guide explains every one of Pip's coded riddles, but nothing helps with Benny's coded go-kart plans, full of strange gear words and twisty sentences.
The neighborhood history fans have studied the club's big fights (the fort war, the creek dam vote) closely, but only from plain or already decoded notebooks. Aunt Rosa says they treat those notebooks as a complete, tidy story and miss how much the club borrowed from the rival club across the creek. Yet every member learned Flipcode on day one, and the biggest news came from across the creek, in Flipcode. Even some of Dot and Hank's best comics grew out of rival-club notes nobody ever decoded.
These gaps make sense. No code cracker is trained to follow a tricky engine plan; few history fans can read Flipcode. Still, because neither side crosses over, each tells a bent version of the club's story.
Step 4 · The courtroom tale
The Case of the Railroad Exhibit
In a made-up town, a family sues the local museum, saying its railroad exhibit gets their great-grandmother's station wrong. Mr. Whitfield calls two experts. The first reads Morse code beautifully, but he only decoded the cheerful birthday telegrams. The second knows engines inside out, but cannot read a single dot or dash, so she used only the printed timetables. "Your Honor," says Mr. Whitfield, "the station's real work, the orders for every train, sits in coded logs that neither expert opened. Neither is to blame: each was trained for one half. But each half tells a crooked story." The judge peers over her glasses. "So the gap is in who reads what." "Exactly," he says. The museum agrees to hire a reader who knows both.