Reading Comprehension · Social Science
PrepTest 114 · Section 3 · Passage 3
Questions 15–20
Before you start
Open PrepTest 114, Section 3 in your official copy from LSAC and read the passage for Questions 15–20, using the structure guide below. The passage is not reprinted here.
Structure guide
- P1: introduces a thinker's core claim that two forces shape each other, faults the usual one-sided approaches, and gives the two-way process a name
- P2: carries that same idea into a second area and defines a key term with a list of examples
- P3: explains the method that follows from the idea and ends with a recommended four-part plan (the closing sentence is left for a question to supply)
Step 2 · The kid passage
Aunt Rosa's Theory of Dinner
Aunt Rosa says cooks are shaped by their recipes just as much as recipes are shaped by cooks. Yet most cooking teachers, she grumbles, only look one way: some study how recipes train cooks, others study how cooks change recipes. Rosa insists a good student of food must watch both directions at once. She calls this back-and-forth "stirring."
Rosa thinks family dinners also come out of stirring. Cooks make the meals. But what they can make depends on the kitchen they inherit and on their own skills, which are shaped by what Rosa calls "pantry luck": things a cook controls a little or a lot, like what the store had that week, how much money sits in the grocery jar, which cookbooks are on the shelf, and plain accidents like a dropped egg. Pantry luck builds a fence around what a cook is able to try.
Because stirring never stops, Rosa says nobody can study all of it. Instead, pick out key dinners where a cook's choices bump into pantry luck. At those dinners the cook shines because of her own skill, but you can also see the pressures that let that dish happen. Rosa's write-up has four parts: describe the dinner, explain the kitchen situation that made it possible and gave it meaning, tell the cook's life story briefly, and show what the dinner changed for the family's cooking and for the cook herself.
Step 4 · The courtroom tale
Mr. Whitfield and the Kite Trophy
"Your Honor," said Mr. Whitfield, snapping his suspenders, "the club's lawyer says the Kite Club made young Dana a champion. Dana's lawyer says Dana made the Kite Club famous. Both are half right. The club shaped Dana, and Dana shaped the club." Judge Bramble frowned. "Then how do I sort it out?" "Pick the one big moment, Your Honor: the windy Saturday Dana's kite won. First, describe it. Second, the conditions: gusty weather, the club's spare string. Third, Dana's own story. Fourth, what the win changed for the club and for Dana." The judge tapped her gavel. "Four parts, both directions at once. Now I can see the whole tangle."