← LSAT®

Reading Comprehension: The Subject Areas

Law, the sciences, the humanities and the social sciences each break differently, and knowing the subject already is usually a liability rather than an edge.

6 topics · 26 questions

Each topic is a path, not a menu: work down it in order and every question builds on the one above. Click any of them to watch the answer draw itself.

Biological and Physical Science Passages

  1. How it worksHow do you read a science selection for its argument shape instead of its content?
  2. How it worksShow me hypothesis, experiment, result and caveat mapped onto four paragraphs of unfamiliar jargon.
  3. Worked exampleWalk me through handling a sentence about stochastic resonance in mechanoreceptor thresholds without knowing the term.
  4. Common mistakeWhy doesn't a science selection ever ask you to judge whether the science itself is correct?
Your turnmedium1 of 3
Stochastic resonance raises the sensitivity of a mechanoreceptor: adding noise of amplitude 5 lowers the threshold at which a weak periodic signal is detected. The effect was first reported in 11 cells of a single preparation and has since been found in 31 preparations. It disappears once the noise amplitude passes 16, which the standard model predicts, and it appears in cells whose membranes have been stripped of the channel the model assigns the role. The model survives the first of those results and not the second. The argument of the paragraph has which one of the following shapes?

Humanities Passages

  1. How it worksHow does tone carry an argument in a text that never states a thesis outright?
  2. Worked exampleWalk me through finding the claim in a paragraph about a poet containing no obvious argument words.
  3. Common mistakeWhy isn't describing an artist's work approvingly the same as arguing that the work is good?
  4. Going furtherWhat changes when a humanities selection is one critic writing about another critic?
Your turnmedium1 of 3
The poet's late sequence is usually read as a retreat into private reference. The 151 allusions catalogued by his editors are indeed private, and 26 of them can be traced to a single household. But a reader who stops at the catalogue has taken the poems for a cipher. The privacy is the subject: each poem is built so that the reader stands where the allusion is withheld, and the withholding is what the poem is about. The author's claim about the late sequence is that

Social Science Passages and Competing Theories

  1. How it worksHow do you keep two competing theories separate when one paragraph describes both?
  2. How it worksShow me the same evidence dropped onto two models to see which one predicts it.
  3. Worked exampleWalk me through a text where one school explains a migration by wages and another by kinship networks.
  4. Going furtherWhat happens when an author quietly prefers one theory without ever saying so?
  5. Common mistakeWhy isn't the theory described last the one an author endorses?
Your turnmedium1 of 3
One school explains the migration by wages: the destination paid 31 percent more for the same work, and the flow tracks the differential year by year. Another explains it by kinship: 74 percent of arrivals joined a household already established, and the flow tracks the arrival of the first settlers from each village, with a lag. The wage account predicts that the flow should have reversed when the differential closed in the final decade. The kinship account predicts that it should have continued. It continued. Which prediction does the passage report as having been borne out?

Why Prior Knowledge Is Never Required

  1. How it worksHow do you separate an answer supported by the text from one supported by what you already believe?
  2. Worked exampleWalk me through rejecting a true real-world fact as an answer because the text never licensed it.
  3. Going furtherWhat changes when a selection defines a familiar word in an unfamiliar way?
  4. Common mistakeWhy isn't outside knowledge allowed even when a selection gets a fact about your own field wrong?
Your turnmedium1 of 3
In this paper a 'population' is any group of 48 or more individuals sampled at one time from one site, whether or not its members interbreed. The 22 populations compared below therefore include groups that a systematist would place in different species. Nothing in the argument depends on their being reproductively continuous. A test taker who knows that a population in biology is a group of interbreeding individuals should

Dense Prose and High-Level Vocabulary

  1. How it worksHow do you strip a sentence to subject, verb and object and grey out every modifier?
  2. Worked exampleWalk me through parsing 'That the reforms, however well intentioned, failed is now beyond dispute'.
  3. How it worksHow do you keep reading a sentence that still has to be understood around a word you have never seen?
  4. Common mistakeWhy isn't building an LSAT vocabulary list a good use of study time?
Your turnmedium1 of 3
A selection contains this sentence: 'That the reforms of 1931, however well intentioned and however widely praised in the 28 years that followed them, failed is now beyond dispute.' The sentence asserts that

AP®, SAT® and PSAT/NMSQT® are trademarks registered by the College Board (PSAT/NMSQT® jointly with the National Merit Scholarship Corporation). ACT® is a registered trademark of ACT Education Corp. GRE® is a registered trademark of ETS. LSAT® is a registered trademark of the Law School Admission Council. MCAT® is a registered trademark of the Association of American Medical Colleges. ISEE® and SSAT® are registered trademarks of their owners. None of these organizations is affiliated with, or endorses, Jentoo.