December 2014 LSAT Section 1 Question 2

Archaeologist: How did the Parthenon's stonemasons manage to carve columns that all bulged outward in the center in p...

ahlam on June 24, 2020

How can we assume this?

I decided against C because I did not think we could assume that the Parthenon is a part of ancient Greece. Nowhere in the passage does it explicitly say it is, but it does say that the other area mentioned was in ancient Greece. How can we assume that they are both in ancient Greece?Thanks.

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shunhe on June 24, 2020

Hi @ahlam,

Thanks for the question! Yeah, this is kind of an annoying one in some senses. You’re really just supposed to know from the mention of the Greek temple that the Parthenon is in Greece. And this is one of those weird things that the LSAT kind of considers “common knowledge” (famous landmarks, for example, you should know the Eiffel Tower is in Paris). Is it objectively “common knowledge”? Probably not, some people will definitely be more familiar with the Parthenon than others (especially the type of people who have been statistically more like to take the LSAT in the past). The LSAT definitely isn’t a perfect test.

But also, one thing to note is that (C) is a better answer choice than the other answer choices, even though you have to assume the Parthenon is in Greece. This is a “smaller” assumption than other ones you might have to make for other answer choices (especially since the rest of the passage is about Greek temples, and so we just have to bite the bullet for this one.

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

zingzang123 on August 17, 2020

Thanks a lot for the clarification! However, I was just wondering why we could not have considered D? If they relied on Dydima's plan, and if Dydima's structure was much more massive and complex, wouldn't that also strengthen the argument?