By: Yana Weinstein & Megan Smith

This is the fifth in a series of six posts designed to help students learn how to study effectively. The purpose is to provide students with a resource that can help them take charge of their own learning. So far, we have posted on:

Today’s post is about concrete examples – that is, using specific examples to understand abstract ideas.

Why do you need concrete examples?

Abstract ideas can be vague and hard to grasp. Moreover, human memory is designed to remember concrete information better than abstract information (1). To really nail down an abstract idea, you need to solidify it in your mind. You can do this by being specific and concrete.

Take “scarcity” as an example of an abstract idea. Scarcity can be explained as follows: the rarer something is, the higher its value will be. But this description contains a lot of vague terms, such as “rarer” and “value”. How can we make this idea more concrete? We could use a specific example to illustrate the idea.

Think about an airline company. If you were to try and book a flight four months in advance, the ticket prices would probably be pretty reasonable. But as it gets closer to the date of travel, there will be fewer seats left on the plane (the seats are more rare). This scarcity drives up the cost (value) of the tickets. This is a concrete example of scarcity, which is an abstract idea.