What are the five hardest Reading Comprehension passages ever offered on the LSAT?
Knowing the worst the LSAT can throw at you can be an advantage in many ways. You can:
Practice on the hardest questions so you're prepared for the most devilish traps.
Feel a little bit better about yourself if you ran into one of these in practice and tore your hair out trying to solve it.
Understand what types of skillsets are required to solve the worst of the worst.
There have been a lot of these most difficult passages. Most tests don't have them, and they occur on average once every three or four tests, but they are extreme curve-breakers when they do show up. And because the LSAC has made so many tests publicly available on LawHub Advantage, there are a few of the passages that I would consider harder than the usual five-star difficulty question. So we'll have this list broken down into multiple parts, with each part covering a section of tests. This will be five of the hardest passages ever given from the tests from 140-149.
First, this list is subjective of course, but these are the passages about which I find students most frequently asking. They involve the most work to understand and have, by far, the lowest accuracy rate when I have students solve the attached questions blind. And these are ordered from newest to oldest:
Test: 148, Section: 2, Passage: 4
The brain scan passage is a fairly infamous one because of the complexity of both the subject matter and the method of argumentation. The passage is quite scientific, with information about the amygdala, fMRIs, and other such complexities. But even more difficult, the means by which the argument is made is subtle. The passage opens with the argument, which is followed by evidence for that argument, which is standard. But then the passage detours by offering a counter-premise, though it is difficult to even identify it as such. And then it takes another turn by dismissing that counter-premise.
At every step of the way, it requires using context clues and the identification of common topics of discussion between paragraphs to identify their actual roles. If you do understand the argument, the answers are relatively straightforward. But this is about as subtle as passages themselves can be.
Test: 147, Section: 2, Passage: 2
Eileen Gray made beautiful art. But there is an entire generation of LSAT writers who fear her name by virtue of the Reading Comprehension passage about her career.
Part of the difficulty here arises from trying to understand the argument of the passage. This passage features an extremely uncommon argumentation style, in which the passage is neither arguing one thing caused another, nor that someone else's argument is right or wrong. Those are the two most common types of Reading Comprehension arguments. But in this case, finding the commonalities between the paragraphs is quite difficult in trying to elucidate an argument.
The other part of the difficulty stems from most of the questions being inference questions. There is little grounding available to expect one answer versus another to be correct. If you don't have solid tools to flow through the answers, and to dismiss wrong answers without checking, sorting right from wrong will take you far longer than you have available.
Test: 145, Section: 1, Passage: 3
Comparative passages in Reading Comprehension are, just like single-reading passages, defined by the narrative unity of the content. The difficulty in this reading about gender and women's history is identifying how the argument of one fits together with the content of another. The unique element here is that one of the passages does not have its own argument, which is exceptionally rare. Seeing the relationship requires identifying that passage not as defined by an argument, but instead as an example of the content about which the other passage does have an argument.
That is a complex identification, but once it is in place, this passage becomes relatively straightforward. There are more difficult ones on this list, but solving this requires a unique step that is rare in Reading Comprehension in general.
Test: 144, Section: 1, Passage: 4
This is another comparative passage, and it is even harder than the previous one. The two passages certainly do have their own arguments, but the reading is defined by the relationship between the two passages. And the Karl Popper-astronomy comparative passage has the most difficult relationship of any comparative passage in the history of the LSAT.
It's difficult to see how these two passages interact whatsoever. The first is about the philosophy of Karl Popper, while the second is about the discoveries of the planets Uranus, Neptune, and Mercury. While the topics are quite distinct, once you see how they interact, the argument falls into place.
The questions, however, remain theoretical and difficult. All reading passages are defined by the relationships between information, rather than the simple understanding of it. But this passage has perhaps the most complex relationship of them all.
Test: 140, Section: 4, Passage: 4
The mirror passage has quite difficult scientific information contained within it, as the passage explains different feasible explanations for why we view 'mirror images' within mirrors. That in itself would make this passage difficult, as the scientific language and difficult, repetitive explanations are quite difficult to differentiate and understand.
But difficult information is not what makes the hardest passages within Reading Comprehension. This passage is most difficult because it is so hard to identify the argument itself. Most passages that contain multiple arguments feature the author criticizing or agreeing with those arguments. In this case, the author's perspective is less approachable. The author isn't definitively saying one of the mirror-image explanations is right or wrong, but rather offering why those explanations make sense to people (or why they don't). Arguments about motivation, rather than value, are always more difficult.
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