Pork is to pigs as milk is to cows. The relationship is “is the primary product of”. Pigs are seldom raised for any purpose other than pork, so pork is the primary product of pigs. Cows are raised both for meat and for milk, but they produce a lot more milk than they do meat, so milk is the primary product of cows. The culture where someone is more likely to come up with this answer might be a Hindu culture where beef is forbidden, or it might just be a rural farming culture where the test-taker knows people who raise pigs and cows, and knows why they raise them.
…anti-Saami bigot! :mad:
This is not a cultural question. It’s a legal terminology issue. In most U.S. jurisdictions, the law states prison sentences in terms of a range or a maximum. A “life sentence” is shorthand for saying that the maximum sentence will be life. It might be shorter if parole is granted.
There there, I know, I know. (Basque and Uralic speakers are also technically left out of that classification, but to a lesser extent since most are just about as acculturated to classical and Christian influences as their Indo-European-speaking neighbors.)
Nonetheless, although no general cultural descriptor can be 100% comprehensive and accurate, I still maintain that “Western” is a much more meaningful one than “Oriental” because it refers to what is on the whole a much more homogeneous group.
Kimchi is an English word. It’s in the Merriam Webster:
김치 is not an English word.
So is “kvass”, if you go by that criteria. But when 99% of English speakers have no idea what the word means, it is definitely not part of fundamental English knowledge.
And, as has been noted upthread, neither is beef.
Well, that’s all conjecture (99%) and subjective opinion. I’m not interested in that. I just wanted to correct your factual mistake.
“A federal jury in Paducah spared Green a death sentence in May 2009, but US district judge Thomas B Russell ordered Green to serve multiple life sentences”
"A “life sentence” may sound like a lifetime, but it’s often much shorter.
There are two types of life sentences: life with the possibility of parole (indeterminate life sentence), and life without the possibility of parole (determinate life sentence). According to AnswerBag, judges often sentence prisoners to consecutive life sentences to lower their chances of a speedy parole.
Judges can also issue consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole. They likely do this for several reasons. First, it’s the law. If someone is convicted of murdering several people, they can receive multiple life sentences (even though it may seem redundant or pointless). Second, a double conviction serves as a kind of insurance policy in the event one of the convictions is later overturned.
"First, “life” doesn’t necessarily mean until they die. For example, in California, a punishment that’s listed as “life” means they’re eligible for parole in 7 years. Only if the sentence is “life without the possibility of parole” will it actually mean they spend the rest of their life in prison.
Second, a separate sentence for each crime can give some closure to each victim or victim’s family. They can know that the defendant got a life sentence for the crime against their loved one and the bad guy didn’t get a “free” crime.
Finally - and this one is especially true if the defendant gets two (or more) life terms in cases arising in multiple jurisdictions or in multiple cases. Suppose a “life” case was overturned in the appellate court. Without a second sentence in place for the defendant to serve, technically he could be released unless he was being held pending trial on another case. Because appeals can take a while to sort through, it could be better from the prosecution’s standpoint to try and get another life sentence while the evidence is still fresh, witness’ memories haven’t faded, etc. Otherwise, they would have to scramble to prosecute a guy years later when they thought “why bother - he’s doing life” on another case."
Acsenray,
Punishment may me a cultural issue. The severity of a penalty may be harsher in some regions of the world than others. Americans would be horrified at the idea of execution by decapitation but perhaps less horrified by lethal injection. I’d like to get some responses on that.
The rate of violent crime in this state is up 30 percent from last year. The fault lies entirely in our court system; recently our judges’ sentences have been so lenient that criminals can now do almost anything without fear of a long prison term.
The argument above would be weakened if it were true that:
A. 85 percent of the other states in the nation have lower crime rates than does this state.
B. White collar crime in this state has also increased by over 25 percent in the last year.
C. 35 percent of the police in this state have been laid off in the last year due to budget cuts.
D. Polls show that 65 percent of the population in this state opposes capital punishment.
E. The state has hired 25 new judges in the last year to compensate for deaths and retirements.
The argument is that the recent increase in the violent crime rate in this state is caused by lenient sentencing in the courts.
I can’t see how any of the possible answers would weaken the argument. (Unless you think that having more police reduces violent crimes?)
C would weaken the argument by introducing a potential confounding factor that is not a priori ridiculous. You don’t have to believe that a 35% police force reduction would increase violent crimes, you just have to believe that it is not unreasonable to think that it could have an impact.
Why should the test be culture-neutral?
The LSAT is designed to find appropriate candidates for law school…in American universities.
Take for example the post upthread, about the Asian law student who wants to practice human-rights law, but did not know what a transvestite is. She is less qualified to be a human-rights lawyer in America than someone who does know what a transvestite is, so she deserves to score lower on the test.
Tests at the level of post-graduate students are not just IQ tests, they are tests of professional qualifications. They are not simple IQ tests such as those given by psychologists–which should be culture-neutral.
But university-admission tests are given to qualify people for specific professions. And professional people are expected not just to have certain knowledge, but also to know how to use that knowledge, in the culture where they expect to work.
There’s no reason why the tests should not assume that the candidate has an appropriate cultural knowledge. I would score better on the American LSAT test than on its Chinese equivalent, since I know very little about Chinese culture. Because I would be a better lawyer in America than in China.
Thank you chappachula. Well put. Thank you all. Very helpful
davidmich
Actually, the LSAT is supposed to be more of an aptitude test than a test of accumulated skill, expertise or knowledge, whether cultural or otherwise.
American law schools are not vocational schools. They teach you almost nothing about the practical skills or special knowledge required to be a lawyer.
You’re supposed to learn that from the person who gives you your first job after you are licensed. If you’re lucky. Otherwise you learn it by trial-and-error when someone decides to engage you as his or her attorney. (Nitpick: You’re a lawyer when you’re licensed. You’re someone’s attorney—agent or representative—when you have a client.)
What they do purport to teach—and this was repeatedly emphasized when I was in law school—is how to think like a lawyer. It is assumed that once you have the requisite analytical and research skills, that you will be able to pick up specific knowledge regarding any particular legal context you are presented with.
To that extent, the LSAT tests not whether you currently have the skills and knowledge and cultural context to be a good lawyer at the time the test is administered, but whether you have the intellectual potential to be taught how to think like a lawyer.
The LSAT has almost no correlative power to grades at law school (previous grades are the best predictor by far), so one has to wonder what the point of it is.
When you consider bias, and especially bias against specific groups of Americans, it becomes even fishier. It starts looking like you are fishing for rich white kids.
If you want to argue that rich white kids make better lawyers and that should affect admissions, go for it. But that claim should be open to public scrutiny, not hidden in a faux IQ test.
Note that all the standardized tests have gotten much better about bias, and I’m not sure this critique applies anymore. But that is what that particular conversation is about.
Wrong.
None of this is relevant to the topic of the thread, so far as I can tell.
Things are getting a bit better on this front. The ABA now requires schools to offer some sort of practical course as a prerequisite to graduation to maintain their accreditation. Often this is in the form of a clinic, but it might also be practical coursework.
Actually, undergraduate grades turn out to be a poor predictor of law school perfornance. There is almost no correlation between undergraduate grades and law school grades, but a relatively strong correlation between LSAT scores and law school grades.
This is actually sort of obvious, when you think about it. If you are an above average student - and if you are applying to law school you probably were - then your college grades were basically dependent on whether you turned your coursework in on time and studied a bit for finals. There is no real academic challenge (that is, concepts you can’t grasp no matter how hard you work) to anything you see at the undergraduate level outside the hard sciences and mathematics (and law school candidates generally do not come from those fields.) There are almost no “assignments” in law school, so there are almost zero points for “turning work in on time”. If you do poorly in a law school class, it’s because you were unable to grasp the concepts being taught, or more often because you were unable to memorize and/or apply the relevant set of rules.*
Beyond that, the LSAT is certainly culturally biased, but law school is culturally biased too. The story I related upthread about my Chinese friend was not necessarily intended as an indictment of law school. She accepted the risk that her English skills would hamper her when she decided to attend school in the US.
More importantly,there is a strong correlation between LSAT scores law school grades and bar exam pass rates. Obviously, schools can’t take law school grades into account in admissions because you don’t have any until you’re in law school. So the LSAT is the strongest useful predictor of whether a law school candidate will actually become a lawyer. At the higher levels, bar passage rates are important to a school’s US News ranking. In the lower tiers, they are important to prospective employers and to maintaining ABA accreditation.
*It might also be because the professor hates you. But I’m not bitter.
I wouldn’t call a median of 0.28 (PDF) from a bundle of studies according to the LSAC “almost no correlation”. The correlation is real and positive. The LSAT correlation is a tad stronger according to the same studies, a median of 0.36. Not such a huge difference.
They both seem to be valid indicators, and they work even better when they’re put together.