We who set our gazes on law school are typically not the most science-adept people. If we were, perhaps we would have chosen a career in the medical field. Instead, we dutifully took the science GEs everyone told us were the easiest and learned the bare minimum about astronomy or physiology or whatever-it-was-it-was-so-hard-to-remember-now-maybe-it-had-to-do-with-rocks?
In our extensive experience working with people preparing to tackle the LSAT, we recognize that most test takers aren’t terribly science-fluent either. So, with our plainly deficient scientific knowledge, it can seem a little cruel that we will certainly get a passage about science on the LSAT. It can feel especially cruel when the topics of these passages can run the gamut from dormant pathogens to entropy in the multiverse to plate tectonics to how brain scans work. So what can we do to make our reading of these passages a little more comprehensible?
How To Understand LSAT Science Passages
Three rhetorical devices can help us understand these seemingly incomprehensible science passages. These devices are frequently used in scientific passages, and can help you understand the subject matter and the point the author wants to drive home. These rhetorical devices are truly a venerable triumvirate.
Look for Author Questions
The first device you should always look for in these LSAT Reading Comprehension passages is questions posed by the author, especially those early in the passage. These passages frequently inundate you with a dense morass of unfamiliar concepts and theories, but there’s almost always only one important point at hand.
Whenever the author of the passage poses a question, you can cut through all the excess info thrown at you, and get straight to the point of the passage, which is simply answering that question. Track the answers the passage provides to uncover the main idea of the passage. Sometimes you only get one answer, and the author agrees it is indeed the answer. The main point of the passage is simply that answer.
Sometimes there will be more than one answer. In that case, the main point is either the one answer the author agrees with, or a summary of each answer, if the author has no stated or implied preference. So figuring out the questions posed and answers provided can help you at least understand the subject matter and main point of the passage, which is certainly a useful starting point.
Look for Analogies
The second device to look for is analogies. You may not know a lot about science, and the embittered souls who compile these passages know this and usually exploit it for their nefarious ends. Occasionally, however, they’ll throw you a bone in an analogy. An analogy will take a scientific concept and relate it to something you already understand.
Past Reading Comprehension passages have analogized entropy to the arrangement of furniture in a living room, the subduction in plate tectonics to an oar bending into water, and the improbability of life in our universe to the improbable survival of an action movie hero. Hold onto these analogies. Use them to help you understand what they’re even talking about in the passage. By relating the arcane subject matter to something we can all picture, these analogies clarify either the central subject matter or some supporting evidence.
If you don’t even understand how the analogy relates to the subject matter, take a moment. Re-read that paragraph, and don’t proceed without getting a better understanding of the passage. These analogies are carefully placed. If we don’t understand the analogy, we’re going to have a hard time understanding anything that follows.
Note: There’s a common misconception about analogies in Reading Comprehension. Many people think you’ll definitely get questions about analogies. Although many questions ask you to find an answer choice that is analogous to something mentioned in the passage, the questions almost never ask about analogies made by the passage. Instead, use these analogies to help you make sense of the subject matter and supporting evidence in the passage.
Identify Cause and Effect
Finally, we should always try to simplify these passages to identify the underlying cause and effect being described. These science passages will cover all manner of topics, but at their heart, they almost always attempt to prove that some cause-and-effect relationship exists. Almost every published science passage has argued that some cause-and-effect relationship exists. For example, one claimed that changes in sea water temp or salinity might cause cholera to reproduce in humans. Another that fish farming may cause as much harm to the environment as line or net fishing. Another that random fluctuations can cause a high entropy system to become, briefly, a low entropy system. And another that the lateral movements of plates of the Earth’s crust against each other cause earthquakes. All cause and effect.
If you can simplify the passage to a brief description of the cause-and-effect relationship, you’ll know enough about the passage. And because most details in the passage will merely support that central cause-and-effect relationship, you’ll even be able to answer questions about those details.
The Rhetorical Devices in Practice
The November 2018 passage about entropy and the Big Bang illustrates how these three rhetorical devices can help us answer all the questions. We begin the passage with a veritable onslaught of murky terms —”infinitesimally,” “entropy,” “thermodynamics,” “multiverse,” “cosmic bubble” —designed to scare us off. But then, a question is implicitly posed: How did the Big Bang occur and our universe begin in an improbably low entropy state?
An analogy is then used to clarify why low entropy states are unlikely—if you randomly reconfigure items in your living room, the room would probably get more disordered (i.e., entropic) over time. The universe works, by analogy, in similar ways.
Finally, we get the answer, which is expressed to us as cause and effect: random fluctuations of energy on a subatomic scale can cause a momentarily low-entropy universe from which the Big Bang could have banged. Now, I don’t understand what “random fluctuations of energy on a subatomic scale” means, but by focusing on the question and analogy, I understood the subject matter. By simplifying the answer to a cause-and-effect relationship, I understood the main point well enough. With just this information, I answered all the questions correctly, despite being resolutely not a Science Guy.
So focus on these three rhetorical devices to simplify these unfamiliar and frequently over-complicated science passages. If they work for me — a genuine science dum dum — they can surely work for you.
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