Reading Comprehension · Humanities
PrepTest 120 · Section 2 · Passage 2
Questions 6–11
Before you start
Open PrepTest 120, Section 2 in your official copy from LSAC and read the passage for Questions 6–11, using the structure guide below. The passage is not reprinted here.
Structure guide
- P1: introduces a strict policy and describes how it controlled a field of creative work
- P2: points out an ironic reverse effect, then describes a first reaction movement, its origins, and how it contrasts with the old rules
- P3: shows the first movement being taken over and abandoned, introduces a related second movement, contrasts the two, and closes with the author's criticism
Step 2 · The kid passage
The Big Team Rule and What Came After
The Big Team Rule and What Came After. For three years, Coach Bramble's Big Team Rule controlled the school cooking club. Every dish had to be giant, shared, decorated in school colors, and show the school as the best in the world. Plain or personal dishes were banned, and only the coach decided what counted as a proper dish.
Funny thing: the squeezing rule later had the reverse effect. New cooking styles popped up as a reaction to all those identical giant trays. The first was Lumpy Lunch. It was started by cooks who had learned the Big Team Rule and were then sent to scrub pots in the back kitchen. There they saw what lunch really looked like: soggy fries, cold peas, burned pans. So they cooked a new kind of honest food. Where the rule wanted giant, shared, perfect dishes, Lumpy Lunch made small, single, ordinary ones. Where the rule wanted the school to look perfect, Lumpy Lunch showed the gloomy side of the new microwave machines.
Later, candidates for student council started using Lumpy Lunch dishes in their campaign speeches. So many cooks quit the style. But their interest in the back kitchen stayed, and it grew into Grandma's Kitchen, a cozy style that missed the old days before microwaves. Where Lumpy Lunch fought the rule by showing the damage, Grandma's Kitchen fought it by making old-fashioned cooking look lovely. Sadly, it ended up too cutesy, dressed up to win ribbons from fair judges.
Step 4 · The courtroom tale
The Case of the Golden Mailboxes
"Your Honor," said Mr. Whitfield, "for ten years this town required every mailbox to be shiny gold, to show town pride." Judge Okafor raised an eyebrow. "And when the rule ended?" "Something funny happened. Folks rebelled. First came the Rusty Honest crowd: plain, dented boxes showing how things really looked. When politicians started posing next to rusty boxes for votes, people dropped it." "Then?" "Then the Old Timer style: painted barns and roosters, missing the good old days. Sweet at first, but soon it was just a show for tourists." The judge smiled. "So the strict rule did not just limit people. It planted the seeds of what came after." "Exactly, Your Honor. Not that strict rules are good. Just that this one had a surprise legacy."