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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
Adapted from Cassell’s Natural History by Francis Martin Duncan (1913)
The penguins are a group of birds inhabiting the southern ocean, for the most part passing their lives in the icy waters of the Antarctic seas. Like the ratitae, penguins have lost the power of flight, but the wings are modified into swimming organs and the birds lead an aquatic existence and are scarcely seen on land except in the breeding season. They are curious-looking creatures that appear to have no legs, as the limbs are encased in the skin of the body and the large flat feet are set so far back that the birds waddle along on land in an upright position in a very ridiculous manner, carrying their long narrow flippers held out as if they were arms. When swimming, penguins use their wings as paddles while the feet are used for steering.
Penguins are usually gregarious—in the sea, they swim together in schools, and on land, assemble in great numbers in their rookeries. They are very methodical in their ways, and on leaving the water, the birds always follow well-defined tracks leading to the rookeries, marching with much solemnity one behind the other in soldierly order.
The largest species of penguins are the king penguin and the emperor penguin, the former being found in Kerguelen Land, the Falklands, and other southern islands, and the latter in Victoria Land and on the pack ice of the Antarctic seas. As they are unaccustomed from the isolation of their haunts to being hunted and persecuted by man, emperor penguins are remarkably fearless, and Antarctic explorers invading their territory have found themselves objects of curiosity rather than fear to the strange birds who followed them about as if they were much astonished at their appearance.
The emperor penguin lays but a single egg and breeds during the intense cold and darkness of the Antarctic winter. To prevent contact with the frozen snow, the bird places its egg upon its flat webbed feet and crouches down upon it so that it is well covered with the feathers. In spite of this precaution, many eggs do not hatch and the mortality amongst the young chicks is very great.
Based on the way it is used in the passage, what is the most likely meaning of the underlined word “gregarious”?
Dedicated
Solitary
Argumentative
Having a large appetite
Sociable
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