LSAT Practice Test 15
10 free LSAT practice questions in the real exam format, covering the official content areas, with an explanation for every answer.
Question 1 of 10
Reading ComprehensionPassage A
Historians who work with oral testimony have learned, sometimes painfully, that memory is not an archive. When a retired dockworker recalls a strike that took place fifty years earlier, his account has been shaped by everything that followed: the strike’s eventual outcome, the stories his fellow workers told about it, the way the episode was later commemorated in union newsletters. Interviewers routinely find that narrators misplace dates by years, merge separate incidents into one, and assign to themselves roles that contemporaneous records give to others. For reconstructing what happened—who called the walkout, how many workers joined it, when the police arrived—such testimony is a weak reed, and a careful historian will accept no claim of this kind from an interview that cannot be checked against documents produced at the time.
Yet to conclude that oral history is therefore of little value would be a mistake. Precisely because memory reworks experience, testimony offers access to something documents rarely record: what an event came to mean to those who lived through it. Such meanings are not incidental; they shaped how the same workers acted in later disputes. The dockworker’s errors are themselves evidence. That he remembers the strike as a victory, though it ended in a negotiated defeat, tells us how the episode was absorbed into a community’s understanding of itself. Oral history, properly used, is a history not of events but of their significance.
Passage B
A familiar defense of oral history concedes that interviews are unreliable guides to what happened and argues that their value lies elsewhere, in what they reveal about how the past was remembered. The concession gives away too much. It presumes that the written record furnishes a neutral baseline against which testimony can be measured, as though the police report or the company memorandum were simply a transcript of events. But such documents were produced by people with interests of their own, under institutional pressure to describe events in particular ways and to omit what reflected badly on their institutions. A police log that records “a disturbance dispersed without injury” is no less an interpretation than a striker’s recollection of a beating; it is simply an interpretation that was written down, filed, and preserved.
Testimony has, moreover, sometimes overturned the documentary record. Interviews with former residents of demolished neighborhoods have repeatedly shown that official surveys labeling those neighborhoods “vacant” or “blighted” counted occupied dwellings as abandoned. Surveyors paid by the number of parcels cleared had little reason to look closely. A historian who treats documents as the standard of factual accuracy would never have detected these errors. None of this means that testimony should be accepted uncritically. It means that every source, written or spoken, must be weighed against every other, and that no class of evidence enjoys automatic priority in settling what happened.
Which one of the following most accurately describes the relationship between Passage A and Passage B?