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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 The Prince by Nicholas Machiavelli (1513; trans. Marriott, 1908)
A prince ought to have no other aim or thought nor select anything else for his study than war and its rules and discipline, for this is the sole art that belongs to him who rules. The first cause of your losing a state is to neglect this art; and what enables you to acquire a state is to be master of the art. Francesco Sforza, through being martial, from a private person became Duke of Milan, and the sons, through avoiding the hardships and troubles of arms, from dukes became private persons. For among other evils that being unarmed brings you, it causes you to be despised, and this is one of those ignominies against which a prince ought to guard himself, as is shown later on.
Concerning Things for Which Men, and Especially Princes, are Blamed
It remains now to see what ought to be the rules of conduct for a prince toward subject and friends. And as I know that many have written on this point, I expect I shall be considered presumptuous in mentioning it again, especially as in discussing it I shall depart from the methods of other people. But it being my intention to write a thing which shall be useful to him who apprehends it, it appears to me more appropriate to follow up the real truth of the matter than the imagination of it; for many have pictured republics and principalities that in fact have never been known or seen because how one lives is so far distant from how one ought to live that he who neglects what is done for what ought to be done sooner effects his ruin than his preservation; for a man who wishes to act entirely up to his professions of virtue soon meets with what destroys him among so much that is evil.
Hence, it is necessary for a prince wishing to hold his own to know how to do wrong, and to make use of it or not according to necessity. All men when they are spoken of, and chiefly princes for being more highly placed, are remarkable for some of those qualities that bring them either blame or praise; and thus it is that one is reputed liberal, another miserly; one is reputed generous, one rapacious; one cruel, one compassionate; one faithless, another faithful. And I know that everyone will confess that it would be most praiseworthy in a prince to exhibit all the above qualities that are considered good, but because they can neither be entirely possessed nor observed, for human conditions do not permit it, it is necessary for him to be sufficiently prudent that he may know how to avoid the reproach of those vices that would lose him his state.
Concerning Cruelty and Clemency, and Whether it is Better to be Loved than Feared
Upon this a question arises: whether it be better to be loved than feared or feared than loved? It is much safer to be feared than loved, when, of the two, either must be dispensed with. Because this is to be asserted in general of men, that they are ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly, covetous, and as long as you succeed, they are yours entirely; they will offer you their blood, property, life, and children, as is said above, when the need is far distant, but when it approaches they turn against you. And that prince who, relying entirely on their promises, has neglected other precautions, is ruined, because men have less scruple in offending one who is beloved than one who is feared, for love is preserved by the link of obligation which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken at every opportunity for their advantage; but fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which never fails.
The overall tone of this passage is __________.
mocking and pessimistic
mercurial and optimistic
disparaging and humorous
authoritative and edifying
ambivalent and enlightening
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