@ said:

Hey!! I also struggled a ton with LR and used Loophole. Keep doing the Translation Drills, they reeeeeally helped me. Retaining and understanding the stimulus quickly enough was the hardest part for me. I know the book really emphasizes finding the Loophole in every question, but I find thinking of a fully fleshed out loophole in my head too time consuming. Instead, I think generally about the gap in the argument/why it doesn't work exactly, and I don't worry about the exact way to fill it yet. I just notice it. Sometimes I can't even put into words exactly what the gap is, I just have a feeling that something is missing between a premise and the conclusion, or feel like there's a flaw with conditional reasoning or sampling strategy, but I can't quite put my finger on it. Then I go into the answer choices, and use the Bad Answer Choice strategies she talks about in the last chapter of the book to eliminate ACs quickly. My biggest timesink before was giving wrong ACs the time of day and thinking that they could possibly be right if I stretched my mind to accomodate them. But there's no time for that. Instead, if I'm spending more than 10 seconds considering an answer choice, I just move onto the next one and usually a later one fits so perfectly into that gap in the argument that I can clearly eliminate the crazy one that was giving me trouble. I've noticed that wrong ACs are mostly just "Crazy Nonsense" there to take up your time.

This is my general approach to LR and it has really helped me. Also, just taking PTs over and over has helped me get familiar with the patterns, so most of the time now for SA or Inference questions I can already anticipate the right answer choices because they very often formulaically connect a premise to a dangling variable in the conclusion. I started at -11 and I'm at -4 and below consistently for the last several PTs I've taken. My biggest piece of advice still is to keep working on translation because that's what helped me the most to have enough time to approach each question without panicking. Then I worked on my approach to each individual question type. Good luck!!!

Can you explain a little on the "working on translation" part? Do you read the stimulus and write down what the stimulus is saying without looking?

@ said:

I started reading more scientific/history related things. I subscribed to NY times and bought some history books and that seemed help a lot!

May I know the names of those history books. Struggling with RC as well. Thank you!

I need help too! Scoring around -5/-7 on LR. Only on those super easy LR sections I would get a -2. Struggling to bring it down to a constant -2. Hate the LSAT as always :neutral:

I just took the August one and cancelled the score. I had 2 RC back to back and it drained my brain cells :smile: LG was super easy but LR I believed I performed worse than usual.

Same here. Have been waking up at 5 and study straight till 1pm and spend the rest of the day with school work. I'm going to take the LSAT in August and I feel guilty if I miss a day of study. :(

#help The "on average" part in A really bothers me. Can someone explain why even if that statement is included it is right?

#help I chose C because I was thinking maybe other minerals caused low carbon dioxide levels (I don't know in reality if minerals could absorb carbon dioxide). I didn't like D because the premise said such as diatoms meaning diatoms is only an example. There could be other algae. If diatom shells did not increase it could be other algae increasing. I'm not persuaded by JY's reasoning.

#help I am confused on D. Can we assume the buying habits of 46 to 55 is not looking at tv ads?

#help when they ask which one weakens EXCEPT .... I can't assume that it asks for which one mostly supports correct? I was assuming that it meant which one supports the argument and thought A sounded weird as a support but others I knew it was weakening.

@ said:

@ Yes, translation is where you train yourself to be able to understand the stimulus quickly by reading each stimulus, covering it and saying what it said in your own words. You can write it down or say it out loud! Basically I would do this until I got faster and faster and until I could even do the super long stimuli.

Thank you so much! This is sooo helpful! Btw, would you look at the question stem while doing the translation drill or you will do a whole section lr translation drill w/o looking at the questions?

#help Wasted most of my time of this question. I was debating btwn A and C but choose A. Why A is incorrect. I was thinking: Plentiful - Leisure - SNP.

#help For 13, I liked C all the way until it says "against a defendant." I wasn't sure if this part was from the passage. Or why it can't be for the defendant.