PrepTest 143, Section 3, Question 5
Home ownership is a sign of economic prosperity.(26 more words not shown)
Which one of the following,(10 more words not shown)
- AHome ownership makes(13 more words not shown)
- BOver the last(16 more words not shown)
- CThe correspondence between(18 more words not shown)
- DPeople who own(20 more words not shown)
- EPeople are more(10 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
Owning a house doesn't guarantee that you currently have a job.
Someone could inherit a home without having much income. Or someone could buy a house while employed and later lose the job. Those possibilities make me pause before treating home ownership and current employment as interchangeable signs of prosperity.
Still, the passage gives us a pattern to explain: regions with high home ownership also have high unemployment. Why would those two things go together if owning a home is a sign of economic prosperity?
What we’re looking for
My first thought is that prosperity and employment aren't the same thing. Someone could own valuable property or have savings while looking for work. It also matters what standard we're using when we call someone prosperous. But simply noticing those distinctions doesn't yet explain the regional pattern. We need a fact that makes high home ownership and high unemployment fit together.
Working the answers
- ACorrect
Home ownership makes moving to a place with more jobs more difficult. At first, this might seem to explain only why people stay where they are. But staying is precisely what can keep them unemployed when the available jobs are elsewhere.
Imagine owning a house in a town with few jobs while employers in another city are hiring. The house is something valuable you own, so it can still indicate prosperity. Yet it also makes relocating harder. You can have that asset and still struggle to reach the jobs. Where more people own homes, this obstacle can help explain why unemployment stays high.
This takes a more specific route than my initial prediction. We don't need to deny that ownership signals prosperity or explain every cause of unemployment. A shows how ownership itself can also make finding work harder. Notice that it says moving is more difficult, not impossible. That is enough to help explain the pattern.
- B
If jobs are moving closer to homeowners, that should make those jobs easier to reach. It doesn't explain why regions with more homeowners would have more unemployment. This points toward easing the employment problem rather than explaining it.
- C
Finding the same pattern under different social systems tells us the pattern is widespread. It doesn't tell us why it occurs. We would still be asking why home ownership and unemployment go together in each of those places.
- D
Networks that help homeowners learn about local jobs would help them find work. That makes their high unemployment harder to understand, not easier. We need something that could keep homeowners out of jobs, and D supplies an advantage in finding them.
- E
This is tempting because we can build a story around it: people buy while they feel secure, then get laid off, leaving them with a house but no job. That resembles one of our initial possibilities.
But where does E say their circumstances later change? It only describes when people are more likely to buy. We supplied the later job loss ourselves. E helps explain the connection between buying a home and feeling secure; it never supplies a connection to unemployment. A does supply that connection by making jobs elsewhere harder to reach. That is why A resolves more of the puzzle with less added information.
More Paradox questions
Learn the LSAT our way
Our platform drills Paradox questions at your level and adjusts as you improve.