CARS Passage: Soccer Fans & Identity — Find the Author’s Stance (Without Your Own Bias)

Sports fan? Careful, your background knowledge can hurt you in CARS. In this Reading Skills Workshop, Molly and Jack walk through the Oct 1 Jack Westin Daily (“Soccer Fans”) and show how to read a familiar topic without injecting assumptions. You’ll learn to spot the author’s claim, track competing themes (losing yourself vs. rationality/good citizenship), and use clear sentences as anchors, fast.

What you’ll learn

Don’t fill in the blanks: How to stop your outside knowledge from hijacking the passage.

Anchor on clarity: If a point is important, there’s usually a clear sentence you can cling to.

Author stance vs. trivia: Track how the author uses Critchley (support) and pushes back on Orwell.

Two coexisting themes:

Fandom can make us lose ourselves / escalate aggression

Fandom can foster fairness, rational analysis, and identity

When language gets flowery: Keep reading to the next testable, explicit claim

Referenced ideas & examples

Simon Critchley on phenomenology & soccer experience

“Lose yourself” vs. “best selves” (fair play, rationality)

Liverpool as a case study (extremes, yet desire for fairness)

Orwell’s “war minus the shooting” — why the author says he missed the point

Try the passage:

Read the Oct 1 “Soccer Fans” then do the questions to stress-test your reasoning: https://jackwestin.com/daily/mcat-practice-passages/cars-practice-passages/soccer-fans

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