LSAT Reading Comprehension | Interpreting Words in the Passage

I'm going to briefly talk about words for a half second. So, one thing about words is that they are symbols of ideas that are much richer than the words themselves. So, for example, if I say to you chair, obviously that's just a five-letter word with very little information in that word. But that word gets its power from the fact that you've experienced chairs in your life, and so when you hear that word, all of a sudden you impose on it your understanding of what a chair is. You have no idea whether it's a wood chair, or a plastic chair, or a metal chair, or a big chair, or a small chair, a school chair, but all those different ideas can come to you. Language and words are interesting in the sense that we have an idea, and we're putting it into a very low-resolution transfer device, words, and we transfer it to somebody else. We say, I say chair to you, I've taken my idea of chair and I've compacted it down into this very low-resolution thing, and then you're extracting out of it much more than is actually there. One of the challenges that can happen in reading comprehension is that, first of all, someone had some idea, and then they converted it into words, and then you have to take those words and extrapolate out from it what they intended. And as we were just talking about with chairs, there can be multiple interpretations of that word that are completely legitimate, right? So, I would say that practically speaking, the way this affects me the most is that when I'm reading through reading comprehension, especially at the beginning, there are a lot of sentences or phrases or words that I'm reading and I'm saying, okay, well, I think you mean this, but it's completely possible that you mean that, right? I don't know for sure, and taking the time to think about what the possible interpretations could be usually results in one of two things. One is I think, oh wait, maybe you mean this, or maybe you mean that, but then as I'm sitting there, it becomes kind of obvious that they probably mean the first one or the second one. One interpretation becomes much more likely than the other, right? Another scenario is that I have two possible interpretations of what they might mean, and then as I read the next sentence, I'm like, oh, bam, it's gotta be this second interpretation because the first interpretation doesn't make any sense in light of the sentence I just read. Now, the reason I'm telling you all this is I want you to be aware of how many times I think people read and they impose one and only one interpretation on the sentence and then end up being a little bit confused as they go into the next sentence because it doesn't jive with other alternatives. Unfortunately, the LSAT is extraordinarily notorious for using long-winded phrases that could be interpreted more than one way. All of this is to say that as you're reading, I want you to constantly try to translate their long-winded words with simpler ideas that make sense to you, and then when you do that, if you encounter two possible ways that this sentence could be interpreted, I want you to think about those two ways and not just oversimplify the test and assume that you know how it should be interpreted. And then as you go into the next sentence, I think it will become much more obvious, and really what happens is you can start reading faster and faster because you have fewer and fewer ways in which an alternative interpretation could even have a chance of being the correct interpretation. As you understand the passage more and more, you just narrow the number of options that the author could be going.