Transit – A CARS Endurance Training Tool
You dread the CARS section, as did I. But that didn’t stop me from achieving a 130 CARS score within less than 2 months of prep.
Transit is a way to begin consistently engaging with dense texts without using up precious AAMC materials, for people who are not big on reading.
⚠ Important
SUPPLEMENTARY: Transit enhances your preparation but does not replace official MCAT materials.
PASSAGES ONLY: Transit generates questionless reading passages, with a focus on developing reading comprehension and endurance. It is your job to slow down, and try to understand authorial intent.
FICTIONAL CONTENT: All passages are for skill development. Do not rely on their content for factual information. Authors and citations are invented to foster critical thinking. ☺︎
COMPLETELY FREE: This project is a free resource. I handle all operational costs personally.
How It Works
Transit transforms your interests into challenging academic passages through a sophisticated AI system designed around how reading comprehension actually develops.
The Psychology
Expecting a personal project to mimic the highly nuanced logic of AAMC questions was unrealistic, so I focused on building core reading skills with dense, complex passages. The breakthrough insight is that improvement comes from developing strong reading fundamentals first, separate from the pressure of timed questions. I had never finished a book before MCAT prep, and Transit helped bring me up to speed with reading and comprehension to a competitive level quickly.
The magic happens when you’re genuinely curious about the material. Instead of forcing yourself through dry, disconnected passages right off the bat, Transit connects unfamiliar academic topics to subjects that already fascinate you. This transforms reading from a chore into genuine intellectual engagement.
The Tech
Transit’s capacity to generate high quality passages stems from a multimodal architecture that I developed after analyzing research in reading comprehension and cognitive psychology. At its heart operates a system that brings together multiple specialized “AI experts”:
The Persona Module creates a complete fictional author for each passage: a scholar with a unique profession, cultural background, values, and intellectual stance. The Writer Module then assumes this persona’s voice, crafting passages with unstated argumentative theses, human nuances, and sometimes dogmatic perspectives that mirror real writing. Finally, the Director Module prevents typical AI linguistic patterns, guides the writing direction/difficulty, fictional asset creation, and excerpt start/stop location.
These components work continuously to turn the topic prompt into arguments that feel genuine while building the skills CARS demands: parsing complex ideas, following nuanced arguments, and maintaining focus through dense material.
What This Means for You
Every passage you read develops 4 core competencies:
- Deeper comprehension through pressure-free reading
- Adaptability across diverse subject matters
- Sustained engagement that resists burnout
- Critical thinking skills that serve you beyond the MCAT
By connecting challenging academic material to your existing interests, Transit builds the “reading muscle” that makes the actual CARS section feel manageable rather than overwhelming.
From Aversion to a 130
My early CARS accuracy frequently fell below 50%. While prep materials like Jack Westin provided immensely helpful practice, and the AAMC questions even more so, I felt disconnected from the material and worried about “wasting” invaluable passages on initial skill development.
My breakthrough came with a proto-form of what is now Transit. The key was building basic comprehension skills through consistent, low-pressure immersion in diverse, complex texts. I started generating my own passages with AI, but the real shift happened when I began crafting passages tied to subjects that genuinely fascinated me.
Anticipating how my interests would connect to complex excerpts transformed reading from a chore into an escape from MCAT prep boredom. This sustained engagement led to a 130 on CARS just 2 months later.
About Transit
My commitment is driven by excitement to share this method with the pre-medical community. I cover all API expenses for generating passages.
Quick Access Tip:
- Bookmark for Instant Access: For desktop users, simply bookmark this page for one-click access to your next passage generation.
- Transform into a Web App: On iOS (Safari) or Android (Chrome), use your browser’s “Add to Home Screen” option. This pins Transit directly to your device’s home screen, allowing you to launch it like any other app.
Sample Passages
Passage 1: “Christ’s hobbies #35CE”
Full Passage
Those scant traditional accounts of the Nazarene youth contain references long misinterpolated, implying customary human pastimes characterized by prosaic endeavors. Scholarship persistently grapples with fragments concerning His presumed artisanal occupations, typically carpentry, occasionally extending to observations on a presumed pastoral association. The common assumption posits straightforward, relatable engagements; what might in other contexts be construed as diversionary pursuits or rudimentary apprenticeships. This pedestrian reading misses the profound allegorical framework governing every aspect of and action within terrestrial manifestation from a primal divine source. Everything operates within intricate, preordained significance, manifesting not through happenstance but purposeful prefiguration.
The very choice of working with raw timber, or perhaps the humble task of attending a small flock, as often intimated in less prominent apocryphal citations, can be decoded as illustrative rather structural. Consider the writings attributed to the Esoterikos of Thyrsa, who contended that the act of shaping mutable wood represented a microcosm of structuring the cosmos. This was not a private avocation a character cultivated, nor was the tending of animals merely to supply daily sustenance; they embodied cosmological principles awaiting decipherment by the contemplative. Such physical enterprises must accordingly communicate deeper, unseen truths to the observant rather than revealing anything about earthly inclination or preference.
From this interpretive position, it became impossible to construe these activities as avocations of a casual nature. They form integral moments within a continuum of sacred symbolism. Think rather of celestial blueprinting rendered in terrestrial matter. The Najerothian Commentaries of the pre-Gothic era, regrettably largely extant only through fragmented citations, strongly advocate for such analytical rigor, dispelling notions of leisure or independent occupational growth for this unique life. Every reported interaction with the physical world, they contend, offered not a slice of humanity but a specific unveiling.
The popular attribution amongst the uninstructed faithful, perceiving that the youthful Nazarene adopted particular and humble artisanal practices out of existential contingency, demonstrates a glaring intellectual failing. It fails in assessing the ontology of divinity incarnate. One requires an appreciation for semiotic precedence over historical coincidence. Venerable Silas of Capernaum described such readings as reducing cosmic drama to local artisan lore, failing to gather the magnitude of the divine intellect which imbues its every public gesture with pedagogical import for those with discernment.
Discretion is seldom sufficiently championed amongst those who would dissect theological personages using instruments too blunt for the task. The physical crafting often presented within extant manuscript traditions should properly illustrate precursory spiritual edifice over any literal trade proficiency developed for material gain. Human occupations, properly understood in the unique context of this divine instantiation, operate as metaphors. They function less as records of particular human activity by that Personage, and more as didactic parables communicated through corporeal acts on Creation’s behalf. Analogical thinking becomes an essential, not optional, interpretative lens without which truth remains persistently elusive.
The inclination to categorize the vocational endeavors recounted of historical personae, particularly if those undertakings appear less remarkable than might be anticipated for figures of profound historical effect, often derives from an anthropocentric fallacy restricting the analytical potential. We assume that even the divinely-sourced personality, when encountered in its early terrestrial existence, must logically exhibit typical, developmental human proclivities. But such a model errs profoundly. We should perceive that these artisanal activities, ascribed by some records to that early ministry or even youth, were not His literal hobbies shaping a human persona. Instead, these examples were divinely imprinted instruction, demonstrating primordial craftsmanship not enacted by a divine being for its personal enjoyment or skill application within a specific timeframe, but revealing that any truly perfected act by an individual with profound purpose is a reassertion of divine ordinance inherent in creation itself, rendering all human production a reaffirmation of the cosmos’ inherent structure for the benefit of all
Parameters and Explanation
Tag Interpretation and Parameter Overrides
The tag #35CE
directly sets the “Year Written” field to 35 CE. All other settings, such as profession, stance, and reasoning style, follow the system’s default randomized process.
Author Profile
The fictional author, T.B. (Transit Bot), is presented as a theologian who studies symbolic meanings in religious texts. They hold a doctorate in comparative esoteric texts and come from a Hellenistic background. Their age is listed as 60s. Their interests, including coin collecting and contemplative gardening, support a methodical and reflective writing style. They take a strong position against interpreting divine figures in human terms and believe such readings are incorrect. Their writing comes from a desire to correct what they see as widespread misreadings, rather than from external obligation.
Topic Selection
The user asked about “christ’s hobbies.” Transit reinterpreted this prompt by focusing on the symbolic meaning of actions attributed to Christ. The author claims that ordinary terms like “hobby” are misleading when applied to divine figures. The passage replaces this vocabulary with more academic phrases, such as “customary pastimes” and “artisanal activities,” which helps maintain the author’s critical stance.
Argumentative Core and Unstated Thesis
The passage argues that labeling Christ’s actions as hobbies leads to a shallow understanding. This serves as an example of a broader claim: any ordinary activity described in theological sources should be read as symbolic. The author believes these actions express truths about the universe rather than individual personality traits.
Difficulty Architecture and Stylistic Execution
The passage contains seven paragraphs. Each paragraph falls within the expected word count range. The vocabulary contains many long words, which matches the intended academic tone. The text includes three short sections that focus on related philosophical ideas. It also references three invented historical sources: Esoterikos of Thyrsa, Najerothian Commentaries, and Venerable Silas of Capernaum. Terms specific to the field are not defined. Passive sentence structures are limited. The overall tone is formal and direct. The writing avoids banned words and sentence structures, such as phrases that contrast “not only X, but Y,” or uses of em-dashes.
Information Choreography
The passage uses three fictional sources to give the impression of historical support. Roughly one-third of the sentences focus on side ideas or broader statements about how people interpret theology. These sentences help build the author’s argument without directly providing evidence. The user’s original prompt is referenced through indirect vocabulary choices. The author never uses the word “hobby,” but the concept is clearly addressed.
Captivating Device
In the final paragraph, the author moves from discussing Christ specifically to discussing all purposeful human actions. This shift helps them claim that any act carried out with focus and meaning reflects a larger truth about the universe. This reframe supports the central argument: that human-like labels should not be applied to divine actions.
Passage 2: “Chaos theory and British colonialism #non-fiction #easy”
Full Passage
Imperial administrators conceptualized a global dominion meticulously governed by transparent administrative systems and definable categories. Their fervent conviction in precise cartography, hierarchical nomenclature, and extensive cataloging derived from a potent Enlightenment belief in rendering complex territories orderly through absolute knowledge. This pursuit often initiated processes of profound but invisible transformation, the designers of which underestimated their power to destabilize. Such painstaking attempts at meticulous control, presented as entirely predictive, however subtly perpetuated historical power frameworks; these frameworks became precisely why later systemic failures gained their inexorable momentum.
Much of British colonialism pivoted upon cadastral surveys and ethnographic mapping, acts designed for rigorous extraction and regulation. For example, local judicial mandates were replaced with codified systems of land tenure, ensuring property adherence could facilitate specific taxation regimens. C.A. Bayly later observed how such centralized command required vast and often inaccurate data accumulation from peripheral sites, creating epistemic gaps in metropolitan knowledge itself. Consequently then, even diminutive administrative errors or subaltern modifications in regional practices initiated subtle but far-reaching perturbations within the seemingly rigid institutional scaffold.
These colonial administrative decisions inadvertently established complex feedback loops where slight localized alterations, often unnoticed initially by central authorities, rapidly amplified across extensive networks. A curious illustration of this occurred when seemingly minor bureaucratic resistance regarding a peripheral canal project transformed localized water rights, impacting not merely agricultural yields, as was the administrative report, but broader socio-cultural cohesion. The initial act of defining resource borders spawned unpredictable outcomes across generations: a cartographer attempts objective delineation during surveys, unaware their ordered lines often prefigured subsequent disputes by generations yet to appear.
Furthermore, the initial, constrained analytical models embraced by colonial administrations proved fundamentally inept at comprehending, let alone calibrating, these emergent phenomena. Official imperial reportage routinely classified unforeseen social or economic stresses as mere local aberrations, individual corruptions, or external interferences rather than recognition of core destabilizing actions intrinsic to the administrative project itself. This institutional myopia inadvertently fostered environments where small societal tensions escalated into profound, intractable instabilities, generating geopolitical volatility across immense territorial expanses through sustained misunderstanding.
These colonial conceptualizations of knowledge production, often mirroring archaic archival methodologies that privileged rigid categorization above dynamic comprehension, propagated a legacy of systemic misjudgment. Bernard S. Cohn later documented historical classification efforts by colonizers within India as attempts at political domination through precise documentation. For instance, peculiarities inherent within colonial censuses – concerning their often contradictory tribal classifications versus extant community affiliations – foreshadowed future geopolitical fragmentations and conflicts regarding newly fixed, yet still porous, borders after empire’s dissolution.
The core premise underlying much of British colonialism involved the ultimately disproven, pseudoscientific assumption that vast indigenous populations and their intricate social fabrics could be precisely accounted for or wholly managed through the application of a supposedly infallible European classificatory reason. This foundational intellectual venture, operating via intensive enumeration and rational spatial deployment by external political entities, proved disastrous to imperial ends. Analyzing this enduring historical failure in light of insights now offered by Chaos theory becomes imperative: it reveals how the powerful impulse to create exhaustive categories and perfectly manage complex socio-economic networks carries inherent paradoxes whose consequences persist in global political discourse.
Parameters and Explanation
Tag Interpretation and Parameter Overrides
Two tags influenced this passage. The tag #easy
lowers the vocabulary complexity and reduces the number of digressions and obscure references. The tag #nonfiction
requires the passage to cite real historical figures rather than fictional ones.
Author Profile
T.B. (Transit Bot) is described as a historical geographer with a Ph.D. in Postcolonial Spatial Studies. Their background includes growing up in an Eastern European diaspora community in Britain. Their interests include exploring urban spaces and drawing conceptual maps. They believe that systems created to organize human life often fail over time. They write from the viewpoint of someone who expects complex efforts to produce unexpected and sometimes harmful results.
Topic Selection Interpretation
The user asked about “Chaos theory and British colonialism.” Transit narrowed the focus to explore how administrative practices used by the British Empire, such as mapping and census-taking, created long-term instability. The argument is that the act of trying to control and define societies contributed directly to later problems.
Argumentative Core and Unstated Thesis
The passage presents a causal claim: British attempts to manage colonized societies through classification and bureaucracy introduced the conditions for chaos. Other possible causes, such as outside pressures or local agency, are not explored. This makes the argument more direct but also introduces a limitation in scope.
Difficulty Architecture and Stylistic Execution
The passage contains six paragraphs. Each paragraph stays within the recommended word range. The vocabulary includes a moderate number of long words, consistent with the #easy
tag. The passage includes three short digressions that support the main point without going off-topic. Two historians—C.A. Bayly and Bernard S. Cohn—are referenced as supporting figures. Passive voice is used sparingly. The tone is clear and structured. Forbidden phrases and word choices are avoided.
Information Choreography
The passage contains many examples of administrative practices to support the argument. Roughly 30 percent of the text presents context or side commentary that does not directly state the main point but helps the reader understand it. The user’s original idea is referenced several times. The reader is never told the thesis outright, but the argument builds steadily.
Captivating Device
In the final paragraph, the passage shifts from describing what the British tried to do, to explaining why their project was flawed at the conceptual level. It introduces chaos theory as a way to explain why rigid systems could never fully manage social complexity. This pivot changes the tone from historical description to critique of the entire mindset behind colonial governance.
Passage 3: “The difference between a painter and a film colourist #1999”
Full Passage
The popular distinction usually drawn between a traditional artist wielding pigment to cloth and an emergent visual manipulator frequently dubbed a film colourist, often obscures disquieting ontological divergences. While both crafts ostensibly concern the application of chromatic theory for emotive or formal ends, the fundamental methods and underlying substrates yield profoundly disparate consequences for perception. An authentic painter engages with tangible light caught and refracted by physical matter, a direct negotiation between hand, vision, and the evolving material itself. The outcomes are inseparable from the brush and palette knife, inheriting textural densities and volumetric presence impervious to pure computational parsing.
This contemporary pursuit of quantifiable chromatic fidelity represents a profound cultural shift from early academic discussions of the spectral. Consider the fervent disputes in Renaissance Florentine studios regarding the procurement of lapis lazuli, a material prized not primarily for its hue alone, but for its intractable earthiness and optical depth derived from actual mineral structure. As philosopher Ernst Cassirer theorized, human perception originally grasped phenomena not as reductive categories but as intertwined symbolic matrices. The digital conversion of analog light into discrete information points represents, fundamentally, a departure from this intimate interaction with presence itself.
The colour produced through early digital processes, frequently touted using advancements in spectral filtering and pseudo-random sampling, is truly a statistical aggregation, an imputed quality without genuine light-body entanglement. These chromatic values exist only parametrically, manipulable integers absent the immanent soul present in original applications. This separation means that complex interactions, such as metamerism’s subtle dance under changing illumination or the iridescence native to organic dyes, become reconstructible rather than inherently expressive.
The experience of handling fine sable brush hair across a fresh gessoed surface, achieving the desired viscous ‘body’ on a pigment blob through linseed oil manipulation, remains conceptually inimical to the operations on a digital workstation monitor. A historical etching, for instance, held to light and revealing its intrinsic paper variations, carries profound sensory data. Conversely, the digital colourist works with reconfigurable units, their adjustments mediated by opaque algorithms striving to simulate material appearance or worse, to correct its natural material degradation.
Indeed, even dedicated efforts in contemporary ‘colour correction’ techniques for early cinematic projects sometimes result in visual artefacts, a spectral phantom devoid of prior materiality. A media scholar specializing in proto-digital forms, Isabella Volkov particularly scrutinized moments where ‘synthetic uniformisation functions,’ despite ostensible improvements in clarity, noticeably diminished the historical specificity present in original artefacts. The subsequent, seemingly flawless presentation risks obscuring prior physical imperfections while generating a novel kind of artificial, untextured smoothness.
Yet, this entire discourse concerning the theoretical opposition between painterly touch and digital chromatic manipulation reveals little about art. Our contemplation, instead, serves as a poignant, rather melancholic allegorization of contemporary digital archiving practices for decaying cultural objects. The ‘painter’ in this extended analogy embodies any document — ancient parchments, historical prints, obsolete photographic ambrotypes — whose original chemical signatures have subtly eroded over long centuries.
The film colourist, in turn, epitomizes the early wave of technological solutions from the late 1990s, when powerful workstations first boasted the seemingly magical capacity to artificially rejuvenate archived items whose colours had begun a slow, entropic return to inert compounds. Much like the corrections on a decaying historical colour print often result in hues never possessed by its maker’s initial chemical reaction to light, seeking to restore lost vibrancy only introduces newer falsehoods under the guise of an impossible exactitude from elements long past corporeal reality.
Parameters and Explanation
Tag Interpretation and Parameter Overrides
The tag #1999
sets the passage’s writing date to 1999. All other elements of the author profile were selected using the default randomization process.
Author Profile
T.B. (Transit Bot) is described as an architectural systems auditor with a doctorate in Information Science. They are in their 60s and come from an Eastern European background. Their hobbies (orchid cultivation and solving logic puzzles) reflect a careful and structured way of thinking. They believe that something is lost when physical materials are replaced by digital versions. Their tone is shaped by a sense of regret or loss as older artistic methods are replaced by new ones.
Topic Selection
The user asked about the difference between painters and film colourists. Transit used this idea to explore how paint and digital colour represent two different relationships to light and material. The passage focuses on how digital correction often removes qualities that were meaningful in the original.
Argumentative Core and Unstated Thesis
Transit’s main argument is that converting physical colour to digital form often creates misleading results. These digital copies may seem more perfect, but they also erase important flaws and textures that help explain how the original was made. The author does not state this outright but supports the idea by showing how these changes affect meaning and memory.
Difficulty Architecture and Stylistic Execution
The passage includes seven paragraphs. Each falls within the required word count range. The vocabulary contains a high number of longer words, but explanations are not provided. About 30 percent of the sentences focus on examples or context, such as lapis lazuli trade or paint layering methods. These details connect to the main point without directly proving it. Passive voice is kept to a minimum. The writing style is academic but readable, with no use of banned constructions or vocabulary.
Information Choreography
Two sources are included. Ernst Cassirer, a real philosopher, supports the argument about symbolic forms. Isabella Volkov, a fictional character, is used to represent current opinions in media preservation. The painter and film colourist are mentioned regularly, keeping the topic grounded in the user’s original question.
Captivating Device
In the final two paragraphs, the passage changes its focus. What seemed like a comparison between two professions becomes a commentary on digital preservation. This reframe helps the author argue that copying art digitally often leads to a new kind of distortion, not an improvement. The shift aligns with the author’s main interest in how digital systems can erase valuable imperfections in physical objects.
Legal Disclaimer: Transit is an independent AI-driven tool for MCAT CARS reading practice. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC). “MCAT” is a registered trademark of the AAMC. Use of this tool does not guarantee any specific score outcome.
Contribute & Connect
As this continues to evolve, your experience and insights are incredibly valuable. If you have any suggestions, encounter issues, or wish to connect for any reason, feel free to contact me by clicking on the ticket below.