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The Lower Level Reading section of the ISEE contains five passages with five questions. Your child will be tasked with inferencing, identifying main ideas, and drawing conclusions through the passages. The test is designed to assess your child’s skills in the concepts they have learned over the past year, ensuring that they have the grasp necessary to progress. They can prepare for the ISEE Lower Level Reading section through a combination of success throughout their school year, and practice. They can use Varsity Tutors’ Learning Tools alongside their schoolwork, which can help them more easily digest ideas and concepts. The Question of the Day is one such tool that allows for random, daily practice in the concepts that will be covered on the test.
The ISEE Lower Level Reading section test practice should cover the concepts that your child genuinely needs to study, rather than every concept that will be on the test. They can use the daily questions to identify the areas that they may need to work on, and the areas that they don’t need to focus on heavily. Your child can then choose the concepts they focus on, optimizing their study time to increase its value. Even if they don’t have a ton of time, studying the areas that need more work may help them to retain the information better. Your child may get a question based on ideas, language, or textual relationships within historical, scientific, contemporary life, and humanities.
Each Question of the Day is chosen at random to allow your child to randomly practice in the core and specific concepts of Lower Level Reading. Upon answering, the tool provides them with the concept name and an explanation of the answer. This explanation breaks the concept behind the answer down to determine the why instead of simply the “how.” The “why” is where you can truly tell if your child has a full grasp of the question. If they don’t understand “why,” then they may not be able to perform those concepts as well on the ISEE Lower Level Reading section.
The randomization of the daily question gives your child the chance to spontaneously quiz themselves on various concepts. This keeps the information fresh, and allows for easier recall. With the additional information provided by the daily question, they can use other Varsity Tutors’ Learning Tools for more free Lower Level Reading section review. For instance, your child can use flashcards, Learn by Concept, full-length practice tests, and smaller practice tests focused by topic and difficulty level.
Reading comprehension is a valuable skill throughout every field of study your child may choose, and it is important to have good study habits early on to help later in life. When these habits are formed earlier, your child has a better opportunity to take their education further. Use the Learning Tools to help your child study for the ISEE Lower Level Reading section to assist them with building a solid academic foundation. This foundation will assist your child as they move to middle- and upper-level coursework in the future.
Question of the Day: ISEE Lower Level Reading
"The Units of Ancient Warfare" by Daniel Morrison (2014)
The armies of the ancient world were generally composed of three distinct units who faced off against each other in a gigantic game of rock-paper-scissors. These were the infantry, cavalry, and slingers. The heavily armored but slow-moving infantry were able to fend off the cavalry with their long pikes, but were sitting ducks for the fast moving slingers who carried only a sling and a bag of small rocks. The slingers in turn were great at taking down infantry as they could out-maneuver them and never get bogged down in hand-to-hand combat, but were easily decimated by the rapidly advancing cavalry.
In this manner the history of warfare progressed for several thousand years. The slingers were replaced by archers, and then by heavily artillery; the cavalry constantly advanced in tactical awareness and arms; and the infantry progressed from swordsmen, to pikemen, to riflemen. Next time you are playing rock-paper-scissors to decide who gets the last slice of pizza, don’t forget that you are channeling your inner Scipio Africanus.
Scipio Africanus was most likely __________.
a slinger
an infantryman in Early Modern England
a historical general
a technological innovator in warfare
a leader of cavalry in ancient times
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