Wood that is waterlogged or desiccated can be preserved for a significant period, but, under normal conditions, wood ...

shunhe on June 14, 2020

Hi @Maria-Marin,

Thanks for the question! So this isn’t the best question ever, I’ll tell you that. It’s definitely one of those “remember on the LSAT we have to pick the best answer choice” questions, because the best answer is still kind of meh, but the other ones are worse.

Let’s walk through the stimulus. We’re told that usually, wood disintegrates within a century or two, so archaeologists haven’t found a lot of remains of early wheeled vehicles to examine (since the wood in them disintegrated). But archaeologists have found a bunch of small ceramic models of these vehicles from the same time. And these models have been less likely to disintegrate, so evidence about early wheeled vehicles has come from them.

We’re asked for a statement that’s most strongly supported by the information above. Let’s take a look at (B), which tells us that few (if any) small models of early wheeled vehicles were made of wood or other materials that disintegrated under normal conditions. This is wrong, because the stimulus just says that there are ceramic models, not that there aren’t wooden models. So this is something we definitely can’t get from the stimulus, and we can eliminate it.

(E), on the other hand, tells us that of the early wheeled vehicles that have not been preserved, more were made of wood than were made of ceramic (and ceramic-like) materials. Well, it’s kind of odd, but we can definitely find support for this idea in the passage. If there were more early wheeled vehicles made of ceramic than wood, then we’d expect more of those to survive, and then we’d study those instead of the models. So there is support for this, and we pick (E).

Hope this helps! Feel free to ask any other questions that you might have.