Need help with inference Questions on reading comp

by **Guest** Sat Jul 12, 2008 1:47 am

I do quite well on the reading comp. section as a whole and I tend to only miss a few questions. But the reading comp questions I miss are almost always "inference" questions. Anything I can do to help improve this specifc part of my verbal score?

by **gandalf_the _wizard** Sat Jul 12, 2008 6:11 pm

The key to inference questions is to realize that the answer is never directly from the passage. In most cases, it is paraphrase of a point stated in the passage.

Good luck..byt the way almost 80% of the questions when I took my GMAT were inference questions in the RC secction as I was scoring in the high percentiles..

by **Guest** Sun Jul 13, 2008 11:27 am

When I did the exam last April, "only" 40-50% of RC were inference questions, and I got a 50V.

Kevin Armstrong
gmatclasses
Madrid, Spain

by **StaceyKoprince** Tue Jul 15, 2008 12:05 am

Either way, inference questions are pretty common on RC. :)

Most of the time, when people have trouble with inference, it's because they are assuming "infer" means the same thing it does in the real world: extrapolate on some given information to draw some reasonable (but not necessarily 100% true) conclusions.

Unfortunately, that's not what this test really wants. What this test wants is something that MUST be true given the information in the passage.

For example, if I tell you that chocolate is my favorite flavor of ice cream, you might think that I like chocolate in general, or I like ice cream in general. In the real world, that would be a perfectly reasonable inference to make - and you'd probably be right. But those things don't HAVE to be true. What has to be true (assuming I'm telling the truth) is that vanilla's not my favorite. Or I like chocolate ice cream better than I like vanilla ice cream. Or something like that. It's not really drawing a conclusion - it's just stating some slightly different piece of information in a way that MUST be true if my first statement is true. (And we can assume that what they tell us is true.)

So hold yourself to what they told you. If there's even a TINY chance that the answer choice doesn't have to be totally true according to the info in the passage... cross it off.