RC Maintenance: Main Point & Primary Purpose Questions
RC Maintenance: Main Point & Primary Purpose
The first of a recurring Thursday RC maintenance slot throughout Phase 2 — one RC question type revisited per week so the skill doesn't go stale while LR gets the bulk of attention. Today: passage-level Main Point (parallel to Day 11's LR version) and Primary Purpose (a related but distinct task — why the author wrote the passage, not just what they concluded).
1. Passage Main Point vs. LR Main Point
Same "therefore test" logic, applied to an entire passage instead of one paragraph — find the claim the whole passage is structured to support.
2. Primary Purpose Is About the Verb, Not the Claim
Primary Purpose answers are often phrased as infinitive verbs: "to argue that...", "to evaluate two competing explanations for...", "to describe a phenomenon and question one proposed cause of it." Match the verb to what the passage actually does structurally (argue vs. describe vs. compare vs. evaluate).
3. The Too-Narrow / Too-Broad Trap Again
Same trap as LR Main Point, at passage scale: an answer that captures only one paragraph, or one that claims more than the passage's actual scope.
Practice items on this page are curriculum-authored in LSAT style; they are not official LSAC questions. Real drilling happens on LawHub — see the assignment below.
Q1. A passage spends three paragraphs describing a scientific debate without endorsing either side, then a final paragraph noting what would resolve it. What's the primary purpose?
LawHub drill-tier RC passage, untimed, focused on Main Point / Primary Purpose questions only.
Back to LR for the third and final Flaw day: conditional flaws, mistaken reversal, and negation — tying Flaw directly back to Week 2's conditional-logic work.