May 2020 LSAT Section 3 Question 7

Newspaper article: Recently discovered clay tablets from southern Egypt date to between 3300 and 3200 B.C. Though mos...

simi_27@yahoo.com on August 18, 2021

May 2020 -Sec 3 - Q7

Why is C the correct choice?? Do historians not know their dates. They should know that if the tablets discovered between 3200 and 3300 B.C. were tax records, that it is no surprise since according to C they did not start writing literary literature till 3300 BC. In A however if they are challenged then if the remaining tabs contained literary literature it would turn the tables proving the historians right.

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Naryan-Shukle on March 26, 2022

Hi @simi ,

I'm not quite sure what the question is, but I think one thing that might help is to remain focused on what it is you are trying to achieve. In strengthen with necessary premise questions, your job is to pick out the one fact that, at a MINIMUM, has to be true for this argument to make sense. C does exactly this: if C were not true, meaning if there was a Sumerian literary work from before 3300BCE, how in the world could Egyptian tablets from 3300-3200 BCE possibly "upend" the idea that Sumerian works predate them. That would mean they're younger tablets!

A, however, doesn't need to be true at all. So what if most recent discoveries aren't translated. So what if ZERO tablets are untranslated? We could still carbon date them and know they are literary works.

Hope this helps! I recommend watching the strengthen lesson in the study section of the app, that will really help sort out what you want to be doing on these questions!