LSAT-Section-2-Reading-Comprehension – Section Two : Reading Comprehension

For some years before the outbreak of World War I, a number of painters in different European countries developed works of art that some have described as prophetic: paintings that by challenging viewers' habitual ways of perceiving the world of the present are thus said to anticipate a future world that would be very different. The artistic styles that they brought into being varied widely, but all these styles had in common a very important break with traditions of representational art that stretched back to the Renaissance.

So fundamental is this break with tradition that it is not surprising to discover that these artists – among them Picasso and Braque in France, Kandinsky in Germany, and Malevich in Russia – are often credited with having anticipated not just subsequent developments in the arts, but also the political and social disruptions and upheavals of the modern world that came into being during and after the war. One art critic even goes so far as to claim that it is the very prophetic power of these artworks, and not their break with traditional artistic techniques, that constitutes their chief interest and value.

No one will deny that an artist may, just as much as a writer or a politician, speculate about the future and then try to express a vision of that future through making use of a particular style or choice of imagery; speculation about the possibility of war in Europe was certainly widespread during the early years of the twentieth century. But the forward-looking quality attributed to these artists should instead be credited to their exceptional aesthetic innovations rather than to any power to make clever guesses about political or social trends. For example, the clear impression we get of Picasso and Braque, the joint founders of cubism, from their contemporaries as well as from later statements made by the artists themselves, is that they were primarily concerned with problems of representation and form and with efforts to create a far more "real" reality than the one that was accessible only to the eye. The reformation of society was of no interest to them as artists.

It is also important to remember that not all decisive changes in art are quickly followed by dramatic events in the world outside art. The case of Delacroix, the nineteenthcentury French painter, is revealing. His stylistic innovations startled his contemporaries – and still retain that power over modern viewers – but most art historians have decided that Delacroix adjusted himself to new social conditions that were already coming into being as a result of political upheavals that had occurred in 1830, as opposed to other artists who supposedly told of changes still to come.

According to the author, the work of the pre-World War I painters described in the passage contains an example of each of the following EXCEPT:

For some years before the outbreak of World War I, a number of painters in different European countries developed works of art that some have described as prophetic: paintings that by challenging viewers' habitual ways of perceiving the world of the present are thus said to anticipate a future world that would be very different. The artistic styles that they brought into being varied widely, but all these styles had in common a very important break with traditions of representational art that stretched back to the Renaissance.

So fundamental is this break with tradition that it is not surprising to discover that these artists – among them Picasso and Braque in France, Kandinsky in Germany, and Malevich in Russia – are often credited with having anticipated not just subsequent developments in the arts, but also the political and social disruptions and upheavals of the modern world that came into being during and after the war. One art critic even goes so far as to claim that it is the very prophetic power of these artworks, and not their break with traditional artistic techniques, that constitutes their chief interest and value.

No one will deny that an artist may, just as much as a writer or a politician, speculate about the future and then try to express a vision of that future through making use of a particular style or choice of imagery; speculation about the possibility of war in Europe was certainly widespread during the early years of the twentieth century. But the forward-looking quality attributed to these artists should instead be credited to their exceptional aesthetic innovations rather than to any power to make clever guesses about political or social trends. For example, the clear impression we get of Picasso and Braque, the joint founders of cubism, from their contemporaries as well as from later statements made by the artists themselves, is that they were primarily concerned with problems of representation and form and with efforts to create a far more "real" reality than the one that was accessible only to the eye. The reformation of society was of no interest to them as artists.

It is also important to remember that not all decisive changes in art are quickly followed by dramatic events in the world outside art. The case of Delacroix, the nineteenthcentury French painter, is revealing. His stylistic innovations startled his contemporaries – and still retain that power over modern viewers – but most art historians have decided that Delacroix adjusted himself to new social conditions that were already coming into being as a result of political upheavals that had occurred in 1830, as opposed to other artists who supposedly told of changes still to come.

Which one of the following characteristics of the painters discussed in the second paragraph does the author of the passage appear to value most highly?

Tribal communities in North America believe that their traditional languages are valuable resources that must be maintained- However, these traditional languages can fall into disuse when some of the effects of the majority culture on tribal life serve as barriers between a community and its traditional forms of social, economic, or spiritual interaction. In some communities the barrier has been overcome because people have recognized that language loss is serious and have taken action to prevent it, primarily through community self-teaching.

Before any community can systematically and formally teach a traditional language to its younger members, it must first document the language's grammar; for example, a group of Northern Utes spent two years conducting a thorough analysis and classification of Northern Ute linguistic structures. The grammatical information is then arranged in sequence from the simpler to the more complex types of usage, and methods are devised to present the sequence in ways that will be most useful and appropriate to the culture.

Certain obstacles can stand in the way of developing these teaching methods. One is the difficulty a community may encounter when it. attempts to write down elements (particularly the spellings of words) of a language that has been primarily oral for centuries, as is often the case with traditional languages. Sometimes this difficulty can simply be a matter of the lack of acceptable written equivalents for certain sounds in the traditional language: problems arise because of an insistence that every sound in the language have a unique written equivalent – a desirable but ultimately frustrating condition that no written language has ever fully satisfied.

Another obstacle is dialect. There may be many language traditions in a particular community; which one is to be written down and taught? The Northern Utes decided not to standardize their language, agreeing that various phonetic spellings of words would be accepted as long as their meanings were clear. Although this troubled some community members who favored Western notions of standard language writing or whose training in Western-style linguistics was especially rigid, the lack of standard orthography made sense in the context of the community's needs. Within a year after the adoption of instruction in the Northern Ute language, even elementary school children could write and speak it effectively.

It has been argued that the attempt to write down traditional languages is misguided and unnecessary; after all, in many cases these languages have been transmitted in their oral form since their origins. Defenders of the practice counter that they are writing down their languages precisely because of a general decline in oral traditions, but they concede that languages could be preserved in their oral form if a community made every effort to eschew aspects of the majority culture that make this preservation difficult.

Which one of the following most accurately states the main idea of the passage?