The Science Passage (verbal reasoning)

Introduction

A quick quiz to begin this lesson: Using only the words “fast” and “slow”, can you describe the Journey Method in three steps? Make your three-word sequence and then check the spoiler.

The Journey Method and the Science Passage

The CLT Science passage bears a resemblance to the to other nonfiction passages in the Verbal Reasoning passage (Philosophy/Religion and Historical/Founding Documents). But it is often more technical and focused on the same narrow subject throughout. In addition, the Science passage is the only passage where the CLT may include a modern composition (something written in the last 50 years), though this is not always the case. Here is a list of sources of science passages found in official CLT practice materials, together with their dates:

• Johannes Kepler (1611)
• Charles Darwin (1859)
• Albert Einstein (1921)
• Vitali Sintchenko (2011)
• Emilie Reas (2016)
• Caleb Everett (2017)
• Naureen Ghani (2017)
• George Stanciu (2017)
• Leif Karlstrom and Joseph Byrnes (2018)
• Charlotte Hugg (2019)

As the list shows, 70% of science practice passages in Verbal Reasoning were written in the 21st century. Nevertheless, since older passages do occur in the science genre and tend to be harder to decode than modern passages, we include a passage written in the 17th century in this lesson. If you exercise your reading comprehension mental muscles with older, more linguistically challenging passages, you should find modern passages extremely straightforward.

The Journey Method with a nonfiction passage emphasizes not only the varying speeds at which you read but also a focus on key indicator words in the passage. Words and phrases like therefore, for example, first, finally, and indeed are all worth noting and using to enhance your comprehension. But nothing is as revealing as a contrast word like “but”, “yet”, or “however”. Make sure you note every use of such contrast words and mine the context to extract valuable meaning.

Practice Passage

This passage is taken from the Grounds of Natural Philosophy, Divided Into Thirteen Parts, by Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, written in 1668 and found at Project Gutenberg.

The Journey Method tells us we should begin by reading closely, and the technical nature of a science passage only reinforces the importance of doing so. The language is a bit challenging and archaic, Cavendish makes clear contrasts and emphasizes important points by repetition, thereby helping us follow along.

Here are a few ideas we might note from this paragraph, either mentally or on our scratch paper: 1) living things (“creatures”) are composites of many parts; 2) those parts are different for each living thing; 3) the way each creature is composed has an enormous amount of variation; 4) nevertheless, there is something in a species that makes its members more similar to each other than to other things, even though they are not exactly the same.

We can expect to have grasped at least some of the passage’s central ideas, so we cautiously speed up our reading. The topic sentence (especially its italicized word) tells us that the author is expounding upon what it means to be in the same species. Even reading quickly, we can pick up a theme of similarity in this paragraph whereas the first paragraph contained more reflection on difference. You might notice the repeated use of the phrase “figurative compositions”; with any unfamiliar phrase like this in the body of a CLT passage, you don’t necessarily need to interpret its meaning right away; it should be sufficient to make a note of it for now and plan to revisit the phrase if the questions require you to do so. It’s a good idea to zoom back in at the end of the paragraph. Notice that animals and vegetables seem to be examples of species in the author’s mind, and their offspring (what they “produce”) are always the same species (“likeness”) as their parents. In other words, animals and vegetables both “give birth” to the same kind as themselves.

We continue moving quickly through the body of the passage. The Journey Method reminds us to focus especially on contrast words like “But” (second sentence), “yet” (second sentence), “yet” (third sentence), and “but” (third sentence). The structural markers help us organize the paragraph and point to a focus on difference rather than similarity. Cavendish seems to be telling us that the same sort of living thing can be produced by different means or processes. The last sentence even speaks of change in the parts of an organism even while the organism itself does not change into a different organism.

As the passage draws to a close, we slow our reading pace. Crucial keywords, though, should continue to draw our attention, and this paragraph is chock full of them: “But” (first sentence), “nor … nor” (first sentence), “Nor … nor … nor” (second sentence), “but” (second sentence), “Neither” (third sentence), “but” (fourth sentence), “yet” (fourth sentence). Contrast words are valuable because CLT questions will often ask about the opposing ideas to which they point. In this paragraph, classes of living and non-living things (animals/vegetables, vegetables/minerals). Also, in contrast to the previous paragraph, the difference between what something produces and the thing produced. Interestingly, though, she includes the environment in which things grow under the heading of “producing”.

Modern science tells us that cheese isn’t producing maggots, nor is fruit producing worms; rather, the latter are growing out of the former. But it’s important to stick to the author’s point of view; Cavendish apparently views these two kinds of “production” (giving birth to something like oneself and being the environment for the growth of something different from oneself) as the same thing.