Supplemental Reading for Science Passages

medianplus30

Can anyone recommend any sources I can read to help increase my comprehension for science RC passages?

I see people recommend Scientific American, but it's not free.

I also see people recommend SciCentral, but the site just links to a bunch of scientific journals. Am I just to assume the majority of the journals provide articles similar enough to the LSAT science passages, or. . . ?

nicole.hopkins

Paging @pseudonymous — she's offered to make some recommendations on science reading since she is our resident scientist! Might wanna wait until after June 8th for a syllabus ...

pseudonymous

@nicole.hopkins Happy to chime in!

@ashleyisbadname Sometimes one is able to access back issues of Scientific American through academic databases, or if you don't happen to be part of any, some high-profile ones could be found via open-access portals.

Regarding the articles in scientific journals... well, I don't think they're terribly similar to RC passages on the LSAT, tbh. It's more data analysis and citation and procedures, and less argument / reasoning structure, if you get where I'm coming from. But, if the point is to get more material to become more familiar with / less scared of scientific hullabaloo, may I suggest starting with abstracts on interesting topics? Every science article has some sort of 250ish-word abstract / summary of their entire write-up, wherein they communicate their objectives, hypothesis, results, discussions, etc. If, from a couple of those abstracts, you're able to quickly and accurately disseminate key info -- answers to questions such as, "what are we interested in? what are we measuring? why are these measurements relevant? what do they mean in the context of our overall goal? what can we do next to expand on this?" -- then I'd say they're brilliant warm up for not only RC science passages, but some LR stimuli as well.

Science passages, I think, are difficult only on a superficial basis, i.e. they boggle you with annoying, long technical jargon that one could care less about. When you strip away all those superfluous details, it all boils down to the same thing... just ask: what? how? why? why do I care? what's next?... and I think you'll be more than fine. Structure & purpose > content & details, as always.

Anyway, if you are interested in looking up abstracts, they're basically everywhere and always free even if the article itself isn't... I like PLOS.org :-) And if they sound interesting, no harm in tracking down the full article if it's open-access -- then test yourself with the pertinent questions--

What's the research question? Why do we want to know?
What's our hypothesis? How are we testing it?
What did we find? Why is this significant? What do we need to do next?

You might consider looking up review articles that take into account different studies and how they relate to each other in a broader context. Review articles also tend to be written in slightly more general terms on the whole, so that's a plus too. They're not as good as primary sources when you're citing something for your own write-ups, but for general reading / knowledge-gathering purposes I think it's a better bet.

Cheers!

sarkisp23

My local library happens to have all the latest issues of economist, scientific American and so on. When I found out I was in nerd heaven so check it out. And of course my unstated assumption is: it's free

blah170blah

@"Dillon A. Wright" I can't listen or read The New Yorker anymore when I'm studying because I'll just spend all day listening to podcasts or reading old articles.

medianplus30

Thanks everyone!

I didn't think about checking my local library, so I'll try that. Unfortunately, my local library's database is inadequate, compared to my alma mater's, which I was cut off from the second I graduated. Finding out I was cut off made me want to punch a wall. I'm a hopeless nerd!

Caroleena

Hi all! For science articles, I cannot recommend Best American Science and Nature Writing enough. It's a book published annually compiling (of all things) the best American science and nature articles. I recommended it definitely for LSAT and also...just for life. It presents a huge variety of science articles, some more science-y than others, some published in Science and some published in Playboy (really). But they're all interesting, they're all well written, and they're great if you don't have a ton of time to devote to a single science subject.