Reading Comprehension · Science
PrepTest 118 · Section 2 · Passage 3
Questions 15–19
Before you start
Open PrepTest 118, Section 2 in your official copy from LSAC and read the passage for Questions 15–19, using the structure guide below. The passage is not reprinted here.
Structure guide
- P1: defines the key term, names a long-standing puzzle, announces a new study that solves it, and adds one small consequence
- P2: explains why the subject was so hard to study, shows how a new tool removed the obstacle, reports the findings, and gives the researchers' prediction
- P3: draws an implication that challenges a long-held general assumption
Step 2 · The kid passage
The Mystery Pile in Grandpa's Game Closet
A combo game is a card game that lives inside a board game, and each half helps the other. Grandpa keeps a giant chart showing how nearly every card game in his closet grew from older ones, but the card half of a combo game never fit anywhere. Then Lulu's class tried a new trick, and now those card halves sit right beside ordinary favorites like Go Fish. No wonder combo cards look like a normal deck!
Card games are hard to trace anyway: kids usually learn them mixed in with other games and can't tell whose rule is whose. Combo games are worse. Their cards have no special shapes or colors, and their rules are printed right on the board squares, so the two halves are tangled together. So Grandpa tossed them into a Mystery Pile labeled 'Who knows?' But Lulu's class used a rule-splitter (a highlighter system that pulls card rules away from board rules) and compared one key rule, how a turn ends, across 75 card games, 10 of them combo games. The combo cards landed on 5 different branches of the chart. Priya bets more branches will turn up as they test more.
This also dents Grandpa's old belief that mean, cutthroat games always mellow over time into friendly ones, so players won't quit. Mean games and friendly games now show up early on the chart and late on it too. A game can drift friendly and then swing right back to mean.
Step 4 · The courtroom tale
The Case of the Tangled Duets
In the town of Fiddleford, a box of old duet recordings sat for years in a bin marked 'Unsorted.' The two voices on each tape overlapped so tightly that nobody could pull one melody away from the other. 'Your Honor,' said Mr. Whitfield, snapping his suspenders, 'my expert used a new filter that lifts one voice off the tape.' The expert explained that, once separated, the melodies fit neatly into five well-known song families. Then Mr. Whitfield turned to the other lawyer. 'You claimed sad songs always grow cheerful over time. But these families show sad and cheerful tunes appearing early and late, and some cheerful ones turning gloomy again.' The judge nodded. 'So the new sorting does two jobs: it places the tapes, and it dents your old rule.'