Create an account to track your scores
and create your own practice tests:
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 "A Very Narrow Shave" by John Lang in Adventures in Many Lands (1912)
It was a cold, clear, frosty morning when we started, the stars throbbing and winking as they seem to do only during frost, and we toiled, not particularly gaily, up the bed of a creek, stumbling in the darkness and barking our shins over more boulders and big stones than one would have believed existed in all creation. Just before dawn, when the grey light was beginning to show us more clearly where we were going, we saw in the sand of the creek fresh tracks of a large bear, the water only then beginning to ooze into the prints left by his great feet, and I can hardly say that I gazed on them with the amount of enthusiasm that Halley professed to feel.
The author’s statement that water was “only then beginning to ooze into the prints” of the bear is primarily intended to highlight __________.
how ridiculous Halley’s enthusiasm is
the author’s fear that the bear is close at hand
the things that are being revealed to the expedition in the increasing sunlight
the terrible weather that the party has to endure
the variety of creatures that exist in the forest
Certified Tutor
Certified Tutor