LSAT Digest 12.30.2021
Quick tip
Get exercise, get sleep, and eat healthily.
You should treat the LSAT like learning any other complex skill, and we should take what science tells us about learning and the brain to get an extra edge. There is a ton of information out there about how much exercise, plenty of sleep, and healthy eating contribute to memory, learning, and cognition, so... do those things!
Discussion
Dealing with heavy jargon in reading comprehension
I went over an RC passage recently with a student that covered the relationship between the pituitary gland, vasopressin, peptide and steroid hormones, plasma osmolality, and the osmoregulation of bodily fluids… oof. The LSAT sometimes likes to throw passages at us that are heavy in technical jargon that no one who isn’t an expert (or at least well educated) in that field would be reasonably expected to know. But the thing that the LSAT is trying to test us for in these passages is not how much technical jargon we know going into the test, but our ability to read around the technical jargon using the context clues and definitions provided in the text, while still understanding the relationship between those technical concepts.
Remember this: the LSAT will almost never use technical jargon without defining it for you right there in the passage, or without giving you an example to hook on to and to key you in to the meaning of the term. Use those definitions and context clues to read around the technical jargon and simplify it in your brain, so that you could explain it to an eleven-year-old.
In the passage that I mentioned above, the basic idea was this: when you drink too much water, your body releases less of a hormone, which in turn makes you not want to drink. When you have too much salt relative to water in your body, your body releases more of that hormone, and then you get thirsty. That’s not too difficult to understand, and all of this information was in the passage in plain language, but the LSAT muddied the waters with a bunch of words that we didn’t know! Simplifying it as I just did above made it much easier to answer several of the questions with confidence.
So, simplify these passages for yourself by using the definitions and clues that they provide in the passage, and you’ll have a much easier (and better) time with RC.
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