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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 “Darwinism and History" by J. B. Bury in Evolution in Modern Thought by Haeckel, Thomson, Weisman, and Others (1917 ed.)
The conception of the history of man as a causal development meant the elevation of historical inquiry to the dignity of a science. Just as the study of bees cannot become scientific so long as the student's interest in them is only to procure honey or to derive moral lessons from the labors of "the little busy bee," so the history of human societies cannot become the object of pure scientific investigation so long as man estimates its value in pragmatical scales. Nor can it become a science until it is conceived as lying entirely within a sphere in which the law of cause and effect has unreserved and unrestricted dominion. On the other hand, once history is envisaged as a causal process, which contains within itself the explanation of the development of humanity from its primitive state to the point that it has reached, such a process necessarily becomes the object of scientific investigation and the interest in it is scientific curiosity.
At the same time, the instruments were sharpened and refined. Here Wolf, a philologist with historical instinct, was a pioneer. His Prolegomena to Homer (1795) announced new modes of attack. Historical investigation was soon transformed by the elaboration of new methods.
"Progress" involves a judgment of value, which is not involved in the conception of history as a "genetic" process. It is also an idea distinct from that of evolution. Nevertheless, it is closely related to the ideas that revolutionized history at the beginning of the last century; it swam into people's ken simultaneously; and it helped effectively to establish the notion of history as a continuous process and to emphasize the significance of time. Passing over earlier anticipations, I may point to a Discours of Turgot (1750), where history is presented as a process in which "the total mass of the human race" "marches continually though sometimes slowly to an ever increasing perfection." That is a clear statement of the conception which Turgot's friend Condorcet elaborated in the famous work, published in 1795, Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progrès de l'esprit humain. This work first treated with explicit fullness the idea to which a leading role was to fall in the ideology of the nineteenth century. Condorcet's book reflects the triumphs of the Tiers état, whose growing importance had also inspired Turgot; it was the political changes in the eighteenth century that led to the doctrine, emphatically formulated by Condorcet, that the masses are the most important element in the historical process. I dwell on this because, though Condorcet had no idea of evolution, the predominant importance of the masses was the assumption that made it possible to apply evolutional principles to history. And it enabled Condorcet himself to maintain that the history of civilization, a progress still far from being complete, was a development conditioned by general laws.
The assimilation of society to an organism, which was a governing notion in the school of Savigny, and the conception of progress, combined to produce the idea of an organic development, in which the historian has to determine the central principle or leading character. This is illustrated by the apotheosis of democracy in Tocqueville's Démocratie en Amérique, where the theory is maintained that "the gradual and progressive development of equality is at once the past and the future of the history of men." The same two principles are combined in the doctrine of Spencer (who held that society is an organism, though he also contemplated its being what he calls a "super-organic aggregate"), that social evolution is a progressive change from militarism to industrialism.
It can be assumed from the author's frequent citation of French historians that the author views French historians as __________.
only worthy of study if they are among the absolute best in the field
highly interesting because of the particular flaws they demonstrate in their study of history
some of the most significant individuals in the field
problematic thinkers when it comes to historical theory
not as important as thinkers from the English-speaking world
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