When it comes to the LSAT test (Law School Admission Test), the last thing you want is to show up unprepared on test day. Never fear! With these LSAT sample questions, you can get a taste for what each section of the LSAT tests—and how it’s tested. Try your hand at these LSAT practice questions, and then head over to this free resource: LSAT practice test for even more practice and advice for how to use official materials before test day!
Sample LSAT Practice Questions
Want to try your hand at a few LSAT practice questions before diving into the full testing experience? No problem! Here are a few sample questions you can use to get your bearings! After you try them, check your answers and see expert explanations by following the links.
- These LSAT sample questions come from the June 2007 practice test, so if you’re planning on using it as a diagnostic, we suggest you skip these here!
Logical Reasoning
The LSAT Logical Reasoning section requires you to read a series of statements, then evaluate the arguments and inferences in those statements in accordance with their internal logic. Note that this may not be the same as the commonsense standards of logic we’re used to using every day! You’ll encounter 24-26 short statement sets on test day, of many different types: from assumption to main idea, mastering each LR question type will be crucial to your success. Then, you’ll answer a series of multiple-choice questions about them.
Question 1: Logical Reasoning
We should accept the proposal to demolish the old train station, because the local historical society, which vehemently opposes this, is dominated by people who have no commitment to long-term economic well-being. Preserving old buildings creates an impediment to new development, which is critical to economic health.
Analytical Reasoning (Logic Games)
For LSAT’s Logic Games/Analytical Reasoning section, you’ll see four games, with three parts each. These are the setup/scenario, a set of conditions (“rules”), and a set of questions (5-7) per game. The group of questions will ask you to draw conclusions based on the scenario and conditions–think of these as the “blueprint” guiding your answers. These questions are all about the structure of relationships as they’re outlined in the problem; following rules is crucial to success. Practice with each type of Logic Game so you’ll be prepared for anything you could see your test date!
Question 2: Logic Games
A cruise line is scheduling seven week-long voyages for the ship Freedom. Each voyage will occur in exactly one of the first seven weeks of the season: weeks 1 through 7. Each voyage will be to exactly one of four destinations: Guadeloupe, Jamaica, Martinique, or Trinidad. Each destination will be scheduled for at least one of the weeks.
The following conditions apply to Freedom’s schedule:
Jamaica will not be its destination in week 4.
Trinidad will be its destination in week 7.
Freedom will make exactly two voyages to Martinique, and at least one voyage to Guadeloupe will occur in some week between those two voyages.
Guadeloupe will be its destination in the week preceding any voyage it makes to Jamaica.
No destination will be scheduled for consecutive weeks.
Reading Comprehension
Unlike the other sections of the LSAT, you’ll probably have encountered something like the LSAT Reading Comprehension portion of the test on other standardized tests. Here, you’ll see 3 single passages and one paired passage, each with about 6-7 questions for a total of 27 reading comprehension questions overall. These ask you to read and analyze a longer passage, choosing the best answer to a question from multiple-choice responses.
Question 3: Reading Comprehension
The two passages discuss recent scientific research on music. They are adapted from two different papers presented at a scholarly conference.
Passage A
Did music and human language originate separately or together? Both systems use intonation and rhythm to communicate emotions. Both can be produced vocally or with tools, and people can produce both music and language silently to themselves.
Brain imaging studies suggest that music and language are part of one large, vastly complicated, neurological system for processing sound. In fact, fewer differences than similarities exist between the neurological processing of the two. One could think of the two activities as different radio programs that can be broadcast over the same hardware. One noteworthy difference, though, is that, generally speaking, people are better at language than music. In music, anyone can listen easily enough, but most people do not perform well, and in many cultures composition is left to specialists. In language, by contrast, nearly everyone actively performs and composes.
Given their shared neurological basis, it appears that music and language evolved together as brain size increased over the course of hominid evolution. But the primacy of language over music that we can observe today suggests that language, not music, was the primary function natural selection operated on. Music, it would seem, had little adaptive value of its own, and most likely developed on the coattails of language.
Passage B
Darwin claimed that since “neither the enjoyment nor the capacity of producing musical notes are faculties of the least [practical] use to manthey must be ranked amongst the most mysterious with which he is endowed.” I suggest that the enjoyment of and the capacity to produce musical notes are faculties of indispensable use to mothers and their infants and that it is in the emotional bonds created by the interaction of mother and child that we can discover the evolutionary origins of human music.
Even excluding lullabies, which parents sing to infants, human mothers and infants under six months of age engage in ritualized, sequential behaviors, involving vocal, facial, and bodily interactions. Using face-to-face mother-infant interactions filmed at 24 frames per second, researchers have shown that mothers and infants jointly construct mutually improvised interactions in which each partner tracks the actions of the other. Such episodes last from one-half second to three seconds and are composed of musical elements—variations in pitch, rhythm, timbre, volume, and tempo.
What evolutionary advantage would such behavior have? In the course of hominid evolution, brain size increased rapidly. Contemporaneously, the increase in bipedality caused the birth canal to narrow. This resulted in hominid infants being born ever-more prematurely, leaving them much more helpless at birth. This helplessness necessitated longer, better maternal care. Under such conditions, the emotional bonds created in the premusical mother-infant interactions we observe in Homo sapiens today—behavior whose neurological basis essentially constitutes the capacity to make and enjoy music—would have conferred considerable evolutionary advantage.
What to Know About LSAT Practice Questions
So now that you’ve completed a few LSAT sample questions, what next? As you might imagine, flashcards aren’t so useful for these types of problems–at least, not traditional flashcards. Flashcards with sample questions are another matter altogether.
Remember, these are just a drop in the bucket of what you should be doing to prep before test day. Finding other high-quality materials to practice with before the official exam is also crucial! So how should you do that?
Official LSAT Sample Questions
The best part about the LSAT, if there is a best part, is that the Law School Admissions Council (LSAC) doesn’t have anything to hide. To prove it to you, they publish almost all of their previously administered LSATs. They also offer a ton of great resources on LSAC’s prep page, including a handful of strategy guides. But most importantly, they give you the chance to take as many past LSATs as you can (assuming you don’t get through every single one).
Each one of their “10 Actual Official PrepTests” has 10 past LSATs. They also have several other books that offer targeted practice, including more LSAT sample questions, for each of the areas.
You can also access LSAT Prep Plus, which includes over 70 previously published official LSAT tests, online. Bonus: Magoosh subscriptions now include access to Official LSAT Prep Plus materials! You can access one of these free LSAT practice tests here!
How to Practice for the LSAT
Once you’ve rounded up a bunch of LSAT sample questions, what do you do next? Well, I suppose you could just bust through all of them, and see your scores improve. However, there is a better way for test-takers to boost their LSAT scores and take their answers to the next level!
To start things off, you’ll want to take a few practice LSATs, so you can find out where your strengths and weaknesses are–which section of the test is harder for you, which is easier. Once you find that out, figuring out what to study in your LSAT study guide/LSAT prep course next gets much, much easier. And, incidentally, so does the actual LSAT on the day of the test!
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