#7 - Specific Reference, Must Be True, Purpose/Function

[Khodi7531]

I'm just here to ask a question about "underscore" in A...


A was literally, perfect. But I for some reason under time thought underscore meant, "undermine". I kept reading it in a negative connotation and thought that's what it meant. Although i've used the word before. Not really sure what happened but my question is, did the lsat throw in one subtle word like that to trip up people like me?

[Francis O'Rourke]

Hi Khodi,

I doubt that they intentionally hoped that you would have made that specific mistake. I do think that they include vocabulary like this to test your comprehension though.

A lot of my students who have good vocabularies learn that they need to clear up some language issues that they didn't realize they had before. When I took the test years ago, I completely blanked on a part of a passage that used the phrase per se. Even though I had read it over a hundred times in my life, I wasn't comfortable enough with it to read it at a normal pace.

When you are forced to work through so many passages and questions in 35 minutes, you will find some semantic issues that you don't have in daily life. When you don't have time to relax and reflect on an uncommon word, things can get scary for a moment.

I would suggest that you keep a running list of words that you encounter in the questions that you don't feel 100% about. If you encounter a new one on the exam, remember that it is very unlikely that answering the question correctly will depend on only one single word or phrase.