Quick Tip: Pay attention to examples in RC!
A great way to anticipate questions in Reading Comprehension is to look for certain types of information in the passage, and one thing that should always get your LSAT senses tingling is an example—when the author uses a particular case to either support their argument, or to illustrate an idea in the passage.
RC questions often reference examples that are used in the passage. When you see examples being used, you should always think, “Why is the author using this example? What is it exemplifying? How does this example relate to the overall structure of the passage?” Doing so might mean finding the right answer to a question, and quickly!
Discussion: Practice Slow to Get Fast
One of the most challenging aspects of the LSAT is the time constraint—either the test always seems to end too soon, or feeling the pressure of the ticking clock pushes you to make simple mistakes that leave you banging your head on your desk afterwards. But in the beginning, the key to getting faster is actually to... slow down!
Think about the best musicians you’ve heard. They might be able to play at lightning-fast speeds now, and seem remarkably comfortable while doing so, but getting to that point wasn’t a matter of just jumping right into practicing at high speeds. Musicians have to slow WAY down in practice, giving their brains time to learn the relationships between the notes and to learn how to control their bodies. Over time, their brains and muscles become more efficient at playing, and something that once seemed incredibly difficult becomes surprisingly easy.
Take note (ahem ) from musicians’ practice habits. If you can’t answer questions accurately at a slow pace, you definitely won’t be able to do so at a faster one. Practicing the same question types repeatedly and consistently at a slower pace gives you time to think, and more importantly, it gives your brain time to recognize the patterns common to each question type. The more your brain sees and identifies these patterns at a slower pace, the more efficient your brain will get at recognizing them, and you may find that you’ve naturally become quicker without having to push yourself. Your “base speed” can become faster simply by practicing more slowly!
Link of the Week
A great way to practice the above is to use 7Sage's Problem Sets tool.
With Logical Reasoning, for instance, you can filter by question type and create a problem set of questions of one type. Answer these in small chunks of 5 or 10, and do it slowly! When checking your answers, really make sure you understand what you’re getting wrong, and just as importantly, understand why you’re getting questions right. When you start answering questions with high accuracy, then you can speed it up!
If you're a paid subscriber, you get the convenience of having the problem sets generated for you! But even if you're a free user, you can still use this feature as a reference, so that you can create your own problem sets with the prep tests that you have available to you.