Which one of the following statements regarding the Earth's outer core is best supported by information presented in ...
June 1, 2024
Tips For Science Passages
My background is in social science and communications. I find that I take painfully long to get through a science passage.
Usually, I have to read over and over and sometimes after multiple attempts, I still don't quite understand what is going on.
So far, my strategy has been to write paragraph summaries and highlight things. Do you have any other tips for me to employ to speed up through passages like this? Please advise. Thank you.
Ivana
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I think the first thing I'd say is that a science passage isn't testing your ability to understand science. It's testing your ability to read a short article and understand what it's about, or what the author thinks.
I personally find visualization helpful, if it's about a physical science I can imagine, I find it helpful to try to just picture the thing in question and make an abstract construct a bit more concrete. For example here, I would more or less just imagine the earths poles flipping.
I also would not get too caught up in the technical details. We ants to focus on the what and the why, but the specifics of the how are less important. In a passage comparing two types of oil drills, we want to know roughly what we are talking about, and why the author likes one more than the other, but the specifics of what makes it better are something I'm ok only being at a 70 percent understanding of and then going back to that point in the passage if I get a question on it.
