RC Reading for Structure: Paragraph Roles & the Passage Map
Recap: From Viewpoint-Tracking to Active Mapping
Day 3 introduced reading for structure and viewpoint. Today turns that into a repeatable habit: a lightweight passage map you build on your first read, so that when a question sends you back to the passage, you already know roughly where to look.
1. Low-Resolution Paragraph Summaries
For each paragraph, write (mentally or in the margin) a 5–8 word summary of its function, not its content: "sets up the debate," "gives critics' objection," "author's response + evidence," "qualifies the claim." This is faster than summarizing content and more useful for navigation.
2. The Passage Map
Beyond paragraph summaries, track: the main point, the author's purpose in writing (inform? argue? evaluate a debate?), the viewpoint inventory (who believes what), and any turning points (where "however" or "in contrast" flips the direction).
3. How Much to Annotate
Enough to navigate, not enough to slow you down. Underlining viewpoint markers and writing one symbol per paragraph in the margin is usually sufficient; transcribing sentences is not annotation, it's re-writing the passage.
4. Reading Speed vs. Retention
The goal on a first pass is comprehension of structure, not memorization of detail. Trying to remember every fact slows the first pass without actually helping, because detail questions require you to go back to the text regardless — what the first pass needs to deliver is knowing where to go back to.
5. Worked Example
Applying this to Day 3's tree-canopy passage: Paragraph 1 — "sets up proponents' case + real benefits." Paragraph 2 — "critics: metric problem, not benefit problem." Paragraph 3 — "critics: distributional concern, same vein." Paragraph 4 — "author's synthesis: better metric, not abandon policy." That's the whole map in four short tags, and it would answer a Main Point question and an Organization question without re-reading anything.
Practice items on this page are curriculum-authored in LSAT style; they are not official LSAC questions. Real drilling happens on LawHub — see the assignment below.
Original Passage: Algorithmic Pricing
Retailers increasingly use algorithmic pricing systems that adjust prices in near-real time based on demand signals, competitor prices, and inventory levels. Supporters describe these systems as a natural extension of long-standing retail practice: prices have always responded to supply and demand, and automation simply executes that response faster and more precisely than a human pricing team could.
A competing view holds that algorithmic pricing differs from ordinary price adjustment in a way that matters. When multiple competitors in a market each deploy pricing algorithms that monitor competitors' prices and adjust in response, the algorithms can converge on higher, more stable prices than any human-managed pricing process would produce — not through explicit coordination between firms, but because each algorithm independently learns that matching or slightly undercutting rivals, rather than aggressively competing on price, yields better long-run outcomes for its own firm.
Economists studying this phenomenon are divided on how to characterize it. Some argue that because no communication between firms occurs, the outcome cannot properly be called collusion in the legal sense, whatever its practical resemblance to it. Others contend that the traditional legal concept of collusion, built around an assumption of human coordination, may simply be the wrong tool for evaluating a form of tacit, algorithm-mediated price convergence that produces functionally the same consumer harm.
Q1. Which best captures the organization of the passage?
Q2. The passage suggests that some economists believe legal concepts of collusion may be inadequate because:
Official Drill Assignment (first official RC drilling begins here)
On LawHub, open one RC section from the "Additional Practice" drill tier (never a full-reserve PrepTest — those stay untouched for full D-day PTs). Work it untimed, building the paragraph-function map before you touch the questions. Log results in the Performance panel.
Peek into Tomorrow
Back to LR for Main Point questions — the most direct application yet of Day 2's argument-anatomy skill, plus the specific traps main-point answer choices use.