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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. Mariott 1908)
Having discoursed particularly on the characteristics of such principalities as in the beginning I proposed to discuss, and having considered in some degree the causes of their being good or bad, and having shown the methods by which many have sought to acquire them and to hold them, it now remains for me to discuss generally the means of offense and defense which belong to each of them.
We have seen above how necessary it is for a prince to have his foundations well laid, otherwise it follows of necessity he will go to ruin. The chief foundations of all states, new as well as old or composite, are good laws and good arms; and as there cannot be good laws where the state is not well armed, it follows that where they are well armed they have good laws. I shall leave the laws out of the discussion and shall speak of the arms.
I say, therefore, that the arms with which a prince defends his state are either his own, or they are mercenaries, auxiliaries, or mixed. Mercenaries and auxiliaries are useless and dangerous; and if one holds his state based on these arms, he will stand neither firm nor safe; for they are disunited, ambitious, and without discipline, unfaithful, valiant before friends, cowardly before enemies; they have neither the fear of God nor fidelity to men, and destruction is deferred only so long as the attack is; for in peace one is robbed by them, and in war by the enemy. The fact is, they have no other attraction or reason for keeping the field than a trifle of stipend, which is not sufficient to make them willing to die for you. They are ready enough to be your soldiers whilst you do not make war, but if war comes they take themselves off or run from the foe; which I should have little trouble to prove, for the ruin of Italy has been caused by nothing else than by resting all her hopes for many years on mercenaries, and although they formerly made some display and appeared valiant amongst themselves, yet when the foreigners came they showed what they were. Thus it was that Charles, King of France, was allowed to seize Italy with chalk in hand; and he who told us that our sins were the cause of it told the truth, but they were not the sins he imagined, but those which I have related. And as they were the sins of princes, it is the princes who have also suffered the penalty.
I wish to demonstrate further the infelicity of these arms. The mercenary captains are either capable men or they are not; if they are, you cannot trust them, because they always aspire to their own greatness, either by oppressing you, who are their master, or others contrary to your intentions; but if the captain is not skillful, you are ruined in the usual way.
And if it be urged that whoever is armed will act in the same way, whether mercenary or not, I reply that when arms have to be resorted to, either by a prince or a republic, then the prince ought to go in person and perform the duty of a captain; the republic has to send its citizens, and when one is sent who does not turn out satisfactorily, it ought to recall him, and when one is worthy, to hold him by the laws so that he does not leave the command. And experience has shown princes and republics, single-handed, making the greatest progress, and mercenaries doing nothing except damage; and it is more difficult to bring a republic, armed with its own arms, under the sway of one of its citizens than it is to bring one armed with foreign arms. Rome and Sparta stood for many ages armed and free. The Swiss are completely armed and quite free. And so I say it is far more dangerous to be defended by mercenaries, than it is to be defended by soldiers of your own state.
This passage is most likely __________.
a continuation of a longer dissertation on the impact of mercenary troops on the well-being of a state
an excerpt from a guide for princes and religious leaders
an excerpt from a reminiscence on the author’s personal experience with mercenaries and armies
a continuation of a longer piece of advice on how best to govern a state
an excerpt from an article refuting claims made about the benefits of hiring mercenaries
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