LSAT

Reading Comprehension Practice Questions

Answer the questions after reading through the passage. Base your answers on information that is either stated or implied in the passage.

The rich analyses of Fernand Braudel and his fellow Annales historians have made significant contributions to historical theory and research. In a departure from traditional historical approaches, the Annales historians assume (as do Marxists) that history cannot be limited to a simple recounting of conscious human actions, but must be understood in the context of forces that underlie human behavior. Braudel was the first Annales historian to gain widespread support for the idea that history should synthesize data from social sciences, especially economics, to provide a broader historical view of human societies over time (although Febvre and Bloch, founders of the Annales school, originated this approach).

Braudel conceived of history as the dynamic interaction of three temporalities. The first of these, the evenementielle, involved short-lived dramatic "events," such as battles, revolutions, and the actions of great men, which had preoccupied traditional historians like Carlyle. Conjonctures was Braudel's term for the larger, cyclical processes that might last up to half a century. The longue duree, a historical wave of great length, was for Braudel the most fascinating of the three temporalities. Here he focused on those aspects of everyday life that might remain relatively unchanged for centuries. What people ate, what they wore, their means and routes of travel—for Braudel these things create "structures" that define the limits of potential social change for hundreds of years at a time.

Braudel's concept of the longue duree extended the perspective of historical space as well as time. Until the Annales school, historians had taken the juridicial political unit—the the nation-state, duchy, or whatever—as their starting point. Yet, when such enormous timespans are considered, geographical features may have more significance for human populations than national borders. In his doctoral thesis, a seminal work on the Mediterranean during the reign of Philip II, Braudel treated the geohistory of the entire region as a "structure" that exerted myriad influences on human lifeways since the first settlements on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea.

And so the reader is given such arcane information as the list of products that came to Spanish shores from North Africa, the seasonal routes followed by Mediterranean sheep and their shepherds, and the cities where the best ship timber could be bought.

Braudel has been faulted for the imprecision of his approach. With his Rabelaisian delight in concrete detail, Braudel vastly extended the realm of relevant phenomena; but this very achievement made it difficult to delimit the boundaries of observation, a task necessary to beginning any social investigation. Further, Braudel and other Annales historians minimize the differences among the social sciences. Nevertheless, the many similarly designed studies aimed at both professional and popular audiences indicate that Braudel asked significant questions which tradional historians had overlooked.

            Questions

            1. The primary purpose of the passage is to

            A. show how Braudel's work changed the conception of
                Mediterranean life held by previous historians.

            B. evaluate Braudel's criticisms of traditional and
               Marxist historiography

            C. contrast the perspective of the longue duree with
               the actions of major historical figures

            D. illustrate the relevance of Braudel's concepts to
                other social sciences

            E. outline some of Braudel's influential conceptions and
                distinguish them from conventional  approaches

   2. The author refers to the work of Febvre and Bloch
       in order to

          A. illustrate the limitations of the Annales tradition of
              historical investigation

          B. suggest the relevance of economics to historical
              investigation

          C. debate the need for combining various sociological
              approaches

          D. show that previous Annales historians originated
              Braudel's focus on economics

          E. demonstrate that historical studies provide broad
              structures necessary for economic analysis

            3. According to the passage, all of the following are aspects
                of Braudel's approach to history  EXCEPT that he:

                    A. attempted to unify various social sciences

                     B. studied social and economic activities that occurred
                        across national boundaries

                     C. pointed out the link between increased economic
                        activity and the rise of nationalism

                     D. examined seemingly unexciting aspects of everyday
                         life

                     E. visualized history as involving several different
                        time frame