Reading Comprehension · Humanities
PrepTest 126 · Section 2 · Passage 3
Questions 14–21
Before you start
Open PrepTest 126, Section 2 in your official copy from LSAC and read the passage for Questions 14–21, using the structure guide below. The passage is not reprinted here.
Structure guide
- P1: reports what some critics say about a figure's work, then the author pushes back, pointing to a source those critics overlooked
- P2: gives the background and long history of that overlooked source and says it was already rich and skilled before the figure arrived
- P3: presents the figure's own view of her role and of how she remembers and reshapes material
- P4: gives one work as evidence, listing the features it shares with the source, and closes the case
Step 2 · The kid passage
Lulu's Recipe Cards
When Lulu's handwritten recipe cards won the school cooking fair, a few judges said the cards seemed to pop out of thin air. But those judges only searched for printed recipes. They missed Grandpa's kitchen chants, a family way of cooking that is spoken and sung out loud and almost never written down.
The chants are old. Grandpa got them from his grandmother, and every cousin who moves in adds a fresh twist. So long before Lulu picked up a pencil, the family already had a rich, polished kitchen art, able to turn out truly great dishes. Lulu's cards simply poured that old art into a new shape.
Lulu calls herself the newest cook in a very old chain. She keeps what she calls 'flavor-remembered dishes': she recalls each dish by its big flavors, so every cook's version comes out a little bit their own, instead of by exact spoon counts like a printed cookbook. To her, a card is a snapshot. It freezes a dish for today, but the dish keeps growing after the card is written.
Her card for Sunday soup shows the old art at work. It repeats the same steps like a chorus, uses the family's stock helpers (the Taster, the Stirrer), sets sweet against sour in balanced pairs, and says key lines twice. She even makes plain written words carry the bouncy beat of Grandpa's spoken chants, so the card reads the way the kitchen sounds.
Step 4 · The courtroom tale
The Case of the Birdhouse Builder
In a made-up county fair hearing, a rival claimed that young Mira's prize birdhouse had no roots at all. 'Nobody in her family ever drew a building plan,' he said. Mr. Whitfield snapped his suspenders. 'Your Honor, my friend only checked for drawings on paper. He missed the barn raisings.' He called Mira's great uncle, who explained that his family had built by hand and by word of mouth for six generations, never once using a blueprint. Then Mr. Whitfield held up the birdhouse. 'Look: the same corner joints, the same paired windows, the same repeated roof pattern the family has always used.' The judge nodded. 'So the roots were there, just not written down. Prize stands.'