Reading Comprehension · Humanities
PrepTest 139 · Section 2 · Passage 3
Questions 13–20
Before you start
Open PrepTest 139, Section 2 in your official copy from LSAC and read the passage for Questions 13–20, using the structure guide below. The passage is not reprinted here.
Structure guide
- P1: sets the historical backdrop, then reports the usual scholarly view of who started a movement and when it peaked
- P2: describes step by step how a new form was built from participants' own material, gives its originator's stated goals for it, and notes why it worked
- P3: brings in a critic who corrects the one-hero view by tracing an older source, then the author agrees but concludes with a balanced verdict: a group effort in which the leader's part was still crucial
Step 2 · The kid passage
Who Really Invented Bucket Tag?
Most kids at Maple School say the Great Garden Drive, when the garden club asked for a bigger vegetable patch, started student speaking-up. By September, the club had already won a newsletter mention for its No Weeds Week, a push to pull every weed before the principal's visit. That fall, Priya asked to use a game to recruit helpers. Priya's group usually gets credit for starting the recess-game craze, which peaked the next spring.
In October, Priya gathered the volunteers, none of whom had ever made up a game, and asked about garden chores. The bolder ones giggled, acting out the hose spraying everyone. From these silly bits, Priya shaped "Bucket Tag," short goofy games with rules borrowing tricks from summer camp. Bucket Tag soon became the signature game of the whole craze. Priya said a good game should end with a fix for the trouble it mocks, tease the weeds, and make players want to pull some. Because the games came from real chores, they had a punch of realness anyone watching could feel.
In her class report, Lulu fairly scolds the newsletter for crediting Priya alone, as if the volunteers' ideas needed her to take any shape. She links it to Pebble Hop, a teasing sidewalk game the town's grandparents once played, which many volunteers surely knew and borrowed from. Bucket Tag was a team effort; still, Priya's part was crucial, because it was neither Pebble Hop nor a camp game, but a new kind tied to both.
Step 4 · The courtroom tale
The Case of the Famous Chili
In the made-up town of Pinecrest, the diner's chili won the county cook-off, and the local paper called it Chef Dana's invention. The kitchen crew asked the court for credit. Mr. Whitfield, snapping his suspenders, showed that the crew had tossed in spices from their own family recipes, and that an old church-supper stew used the same smoky trick. "So it was all the crew?" asked Judge Okafor. "Not quite, Your Honor," said Mr. Whitfield. "Dana took those ideas and built something that is neither the church stew nor her cooking-school chili. A team made it, but her hand shaped it." The judge ruled for shared credit, with Dana's part named crucial. Lesson: an author can fix a one-hero story without erasing the hero.