Choice (A) makes a valid point. Difficulties may arise when corporations attempt to become involved in politics. However, the passage doesn’t give that as a reason for a boycott, so Choice (A) is wrong. Choice (B) seems logical because a company that ignores its customers will probably fail. The passage mentions corporate communications with customers in the first sentence but not the customer’s perspective, so Choice (B) is wrong. Choice (C) is also true, because according to the passage, multinational corporations run the risk of alienating any group and thus inciting a boycott, which is a reason given by the passage. Correct answer: Choice (C).
11. Which of the following statements about the Sullivan Principles can best be inferred from the passage?
Choice (A) is the trap here. Perhaps you assumed that because the companies seem to dislike the Sullivan Principles, they hurt company profits. However, the passage says nothing about profits. Maybe the companies still made good profits but objected to the Sullivan Principles, well, on principle. The companies just may not have wanted governmental intervention, even if profits weren’t decreased.
The key words to search for are Sullivan Principles; then read around them. The Principles appear in the last sentence, and just before that, the passage states that business leaders “fear such ‘voluntary’ concepts may someday be given the force of law.” Because business leaders fear that the adoption of voluntary guidelines will lead to forced legislation, the Sullivan Principles will have a chilling effect on the future adoption of voluntary guidelines. The correct answer is Choice (E).
The humanities passage
A humanities passage may be about art, music, philosophy, drama, or literature. It typically places its subject in a positive light, especially if it’s about a person who was a pioneer in his or her field, such as the first African American astronaut or the first female doctor. Use this to your advantage: If someone is worthy of mention historically or in a Reading Comprehension passage, then he or she probably was an amazing person or did something truly noteworthy. Look for this sense of admiration from the author to create the context in which to frame the passage.
Here’s an example of a typical humanities passage, taken from LSAT For Dummies by Amy Hackney Blackwell (Wiley), about someone you’ve probably never heard of before but will still enjoy reading about.
Junzaburou Nishiwaki, a 20th-century Japanese poet, scholar, and translator, spent his career working to introduce Japanese readers to European and American writing and to break his country out of its literary insularity. He was interested in European culture all his life. Born to a wealthy family in rural Niigata prefecture in 1894, Nishiwaki spent his youth aspiring to be a painter and traveled to Tokyo in 1911 to study fused Japanese and European artistic traditions. After his father died in 1913, Nishiwaki studied economics at Keio University, but his real love was English literature. After graduating, he worked for several years as a reporter at the English-language Japan Times and as a teacher at Keio University.
Nishiwaki finally received the opportunity to concentrate on English literature in 1922, when Keio University sent him to Oxford University for three years. He spent this time reading literature in Old and Middle English and classical Greek and Latin. He became fluent in English, French, German, Latin, and Greek. While he was in England, Roaring Twenties modernism caught his eye, and the works of writers such as James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot were crucially important to his literary development. In 1925, Nishiwaki published his first book, Spectrum, a volume of poems written in English. He explained that English offered him much more freedom of expression than traditional Japanese poetic language.
Nishiwaki returned to Keio University in 1925 and became a professor of English literature, teaching linguistics, Old and Middle English, and the history of English literature. He remained active in modernist and avant-garde literary circles. In 1933 he published Ambarvalia, his first volume of poetry written in Japanese; this collection of surrealist verse ranged far and wide through European geography and history and included Japanese translations of Catullus, Sophocles, and Shakespeare. Angered by the Japanese government’s fascist policies, Nishiwaki refused to write poetry during the Second World War. He spent the war years writing a dissertation on ancient Germanic literature.
After the war, Nishiwaki resumed his poetic pursuits and in 1947 published Tabibito kaerazu, in which he abandoned modernist language and returned to a classical Japanese poetic style but with his own postmodernist touch, incorporating both Eastern and Western literary traditions. In 1953, Nishiwaki published Kindai no guuwa, which critics consider his most poetically mature work. He spent his last years producing works of such writers as D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Stéphane Mallarmé, Shakespeare, and Chaucer. Nishiwaki retired from Keio University in 1962, though he continued to teach and write poetry. Before his death in 1982, he received numerous honors and awards; he was appointed to the Japanese Academy of Arts and Sciences, named a Person of Cultural Merit, and nominated for the Nobel Prize by Ezra Pound. Critics today consider Nishiwaki to have exercised more influence on younger poets than any other Japanese poet since 1945.