Hi all, I have completed my 3rd online test, and surprisingly made more mistakes on the Verbal Section due to 2 hard Readings. The first one was about LYOSOSOMES and the 2nd one was about a kind of BACTERIA Disease.
Apart from the techniques we learned in the book, does anyone have an advice on how to attack this hard science readings?
Many tks in advance, Max.
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- StaceyKoprince
- ManhattanGMAT Staff
- Posts: 9361
- Joined: Wed Oct 19, 2005 9:05 am
- Location: Montreal
Don't worry about Lysosomes - it's too long. You won't have something like that on the real test. The Bacteria passage, on the other hand, is fair game.
Go for the big picture - don't worry about the detail. Make everything else as high-level as you can. And if you run across an unfamiliar word or term, don't even try to remember it or understand what's going on with it - replace it with a variable. For example, from the Bacteria passage:
P1: New research [ignore the names] challenges an old theory. That old theory said that some bacteria can be "trained" to mutate by withholding something it normally needs. For example, a particular kind needs X to reproduce Earlier researchers took away the X and then mutant ones grew that didn't need the X to reproduce.
(X replaces the word tryptophan)
P2: The new research said that taking away the X didn't actually cause any mutations to occur. Instead, the mutant ones already existed in very tiny amounts. If you experiment with large quantities, then you can find the tiny amounts of mutant ones. (ignore things like "bacteria grown in agar cultures" - big picture only) "because of the possibility" that something else could have been going on, they tested some other things too and again found that the mutant ones were already there from the beginning. They concluded that the mutations were genetic in origin, not caused by withholding X. The amount of X didn't matter.
That sort of thing. If you get a question about some detail that you didn't bother with on the first read-through - okay, go deal with it at that point. But on the first read-through, pretend you have to summarize at a high level for a 14-year-old, or your boss who can never remember any details. :)
Go for the big picture - don't worry about the detail. Make everything else as high-level as you can. And if you run across an unfamiliar word or term, don't even try to remember it or understand what's going on with it - replace it with a variable. For example, from the Bacteria passage:
P1: New research [ignore the names] challenges an old theory. That old theory said that some bacteria can be "trained" to mutate by withholding something it normally needs. For example, a particular kind needs X to reproduce Earlier researchers took away the X and then mutant ones grew that didn't need the X to reproduce.
(X replaces the word tryptophan)
P2: The new research said that taking away the X didn't actually cause any mutations to occur. Instead, the mutant ones already existed in very tiny amounts. If you experiment with large quantities, then you can find the tiny amounts of mutant ones. (ignore things like "bacteria grown in agar cultures" - big picture only) "because of the possibility" that something else could have been going on, they tested some other things too and again found that the mutant ones were already there from the beginning. They concluded that the mutations were genetic in origin, not caused by withholding X. The amount of X didn't matter.
That sort of thing. If you get a question about some detail that you didn't bother with on the first read-through - okay, go deal with it at that point. But on the first read-through, pretend you have to summarize at a high level for a 14-year-old, or your boss who can never remember any details. :)
Stacey Koprince
Instructor
Director, Content & Curriculum
ManhattanPrep
Instructor
Director, Content & Curriculum
ManhattanPrep
2 posts Page 1 of 1