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The Law School Admission Test is the preliminary requirement ahead of getting into law school in North America, as well as a few other countries. The test is designed to evaluate your abilities based on three types of questions: reasoning logically and analytically, and reading comprehension skills. There are five total sections with multiple-choice questions that evaluate your abilities based on those critical concepts. You are given complex, dense, and intricate passages that you need to be able to understand, and use for or against an argument. Lawyers need to be able to make sense of these complicated texts, particularly when they are helping a client comprehend the jargon. Whether you need top LSAT tutors in New York, LSAT tutors in Chicago, or top LSAT tutors in Los Angeles, working with a pro may take your studies to the next level. Varsity Tutors’ Learning Tools also offer you a variety of materials to use to prepare for the LSAT Reading section. You can get free test practice daily through the Question of the Day alone.
The questions you may be asked throughout the LSAT Reading section typically focus heavily on how newly introduced evidence and information can impact the argument at hand. These questions take skill to trace out the author’s claims and what implications they have, along with what is presented as the basis for the information. You may need to predict the author’s stance on a topic, or determine the purpose behind a passage. Varsity Tutors also offers resources like free LSAT Reading Practice Tests to help with your self-paced study, or you may want to consider an LSAT Reading tutor.
When you use the Question of the Day, you are given a variety of questions that come straight from the LSAT Reading practice tests. These cover a wide range of concepts. You need to be able to analyze comparisons between reading passages, effects of new information on previously read content, and extrapolate conclusions from these comparisons. You will need to be able to analyze humanities passages, such as main ideas, details, phrasing and vocabulary based on context, authorial tones and attitudes, organization and structures, identifying purpose, new information that strengthens, weakens or otherwise effects arguments, parallel reasoning, inferences based on information, and analogous cases. You may be given law-oriented questions, such as analyzing law passages for main idea, details, vocabulary comprehension, tone and attitude, purpose, structure, and organization, as well as information that affects passages, drawing inferences, parallel reasoning, and analogous cases. You will also work with science and social science passages. In addition to the LSAT Reading Question of the Day and LSAT Reading tutoring, you may also want to consider using some of our LSAT Reading Flashcards.
To maximize your performance on the LSAT Reading section, you need to take the time to diligently prepare for it by taking advantage of free LSAT Reading practice. You can effectively practice your skills to ensure they are fine tuned for the test. There are numerous Learning Tools to choose from that are designed to supplement your studies, refresh your mind, and provide valuable study aid. The Question of the Day offers you daily practice for the test. You can also take full-length practice tests to evaluate your progress, preparation, and weak points. These can be great for identifying the concepts that you need to work with the most. Then you can use the Learn by Concept tool to delve deeper into those concepts.
With Varsity Tutors’ Learning Tools, you can work with concepts on a deeper level. Whether you use the practice tests, Learn by Concept, Question of the Day, or all of them, you can get valuable practice before you take the LSAT.
Question of the Day: LSAT Reading
Adapted from "Recent Views as to Direct Action of Light on the Colors of Flowers and Fruits" in Tropical Nature, and Other Essays by Alfred Russel Wallace (1878)
The theory that the brilliant colors of flowers and fruits is due to the direct action of light has been supported by a recent writer by examples taken from the arctic instead of from the tropical flora. In the arctic regions, vegetation is excessively rapid during the short summer, and this is held to be due to the continuous action of light throughout the long summer days. "The further we advance towards the north, the more the leaves of plants increase in size as if to absorb a greater proportion of the solar rays. M. Grisebach says that during a journey in Norway he observed that the majority of deciduous trees had already, at the 60th degree of latitude, larger leaves than in Germany, while M. Ch. Martins has made a similar observation as regards the leguminous plants cultivated in Lapland.” The same writer goes on to say that all the seeds of cultivated plants acquire a deeper color the further north they are grown, white haricots becoming brown or black, and white wheat becoming brown, while the green color of all vegetation becomes more intense. The flowers also are similarly changed: those which are white or yellow in central Europe becoming red or orange in Norway. This is what occurs in the Alpine flora, and the cause is said to be the same in both—the greater intensity of the sunlight. In the one the light is more persistent, in the other more intense because it traverses a less thickness of atmosphere.
Admitting the facts as above stated to be in themselves correct, they do not by any means establish the theory founded on them; and it is curious that Grisebach, who has been quoted by this writer for the fact of the increased size of the foliage, gives a totally different explanation of the more vivid colors of Arctic flowers. He says, “We see flowers become larger and more richly colored in proportion as, by the increasing length of winter, insects become rarer, and their cooperation in the act of fecundation is exposed to more uncertain chances.” (Vegetation du Globe, col. i. p. 61—French translation.) This is the theory here adopted to explain the colors of Alpine plants, and we believe there are many facts that will show it to be the preferable one. The statement that the white and yellow flowers of temperate Europe become red or golden in the Arctic regions must we think be incorrect. By roughly tabulating the colors of the plants given by Sir Joseph Hooker as permanently Arctic, we find among fifty species with more or less conspicuous flowers, twenty-five white, twelve yellow, eight purple or blue, three lilac, and two red or pink; showing a very similar proportion of white and yellow flowers to what obtains further south.
What role does the underlined sentence play in the passage as a whole?
It provides a counterargument opposing the theory of the "recent writer" quoted in the first paragraph.
It provides evidence that the phenomenon being discussed exists, but does not support one theory more than the other.
It provides evidence that supports the theory of the writer quoted in the first paragraph, but casts doubt on other theories.
It demonstrates that the "recent writer" quoted in the first paragraph is unreliable.
It offers an opinion as to the validity of the theory of the "recent writer" quoted in the first paragraph.
All ISEE Upper Level Reading Resources
