LNAT · Section A
LNAT main point questions
Pick the sentence that states what the whole passage is arguing for.
How to spot it
- Which of the following best expresses the main point of the passage?
- What is the author's main conclusion?
Try one
Original example
Councils facing tight budgets often treat public libraries as the easiest service to cut, on the grounds that anyone can now find information online. But this misreads what libraries do.
A search engine returns pages; it does not teach a nine-year-old which of them to trust, lend a laptop to someone who cannot afford one, or offer a warm, quiet room to a student whose home has neither. Footfall figures that count only book loans miss most of this activity. Before closing a branch, a council should therefore measure everything the building is used for, not just how many books leave it.
Which of the following best expresses the main point of the passage?
The method
- Find the claim every other sentence supports.
- Test it: ask "why?" and the passage should answer.
- Reject options that are true but only a reason or a detail.
The trap
Watch forChoosing a true sentence from the passage that is a reason, not the point it supports.
Now a harder one
Harder
It is often said that juries should be abolished for long fraud trials because ordinary people cannot follow complex financial evidence. Yet judges are not accountants either; they too depend on experts to explain the figures, and when the explanation is clear, juries follow it well.
The real difficulty in such trials is length. A case that runs for a year removes jurors from work and family, and those who can serve that long are unlikely to be typical of the public. So the reform worth considering is shorter trials, not the removal of juries. Limiting the charges to the strongest counts would serve that end.
Which of the following best expresses the main conclusion of the passage?