September 1998 LSAT Section 3 Question 20

Only poetry cannot be translated well, and therefore it is poets who preserve languages, for we would not bother to l...

Alec on July 14, 2021

Why B?

Doesn't the part of the stimulus that talks about poets preserving language lend support for B? I understand that it doesn't explicitly mention purpose.

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lklop on August 12, 2021

I'm not an instructor and I'm not completely sure that this is the right way to go about the question - but I let process of elimination guide me in this one:

C, D, and E are all weaker statements--weak enough to be supported by the stronger language in the stimulus, so I ruled those out pretty quickly.
A vs. B is what threw me off, but A (though very strong) is actually supported by the first part of the stimulus "Only poetry cannot be translated well" which means that
not translated well --> poetry
not poetry --> translated well
or in other words
all nonpoetic literature --> translated well.

So this only left me with (B) where, as you said, "purpose" is not explicitly mentioned, so it seemed like the best answer choice here (although not immediately clear).

Emil-Kunkin on October 13 at 09:34PM

Process of elimination is indeed a great way to get here, but I think we have a stronger option in B. As you noted, the passage says nothing about purpose. We have no clue about the actual intent of poets!