Need Strategy help on SC question

[dippradhan]

Hi,
I need strategy help for specific type of SC questions.

Some of the SC problems are lenghty(entire question is underlined), and answer choices are not easy to split. LEt me give an example--OG 12 SC#98.
(1)WHen I scanned vertically I could not identify the difference between answer choices.
(2)I started reading each of the answer choice. I lost more than 3 minutes to choose an answer.

Q.How quickly I can split the answer choices?

I appreciate any help.
~Dipankar

[drew.eng]

Hi dippradhan,

yes...this problem is long and filled with issues. My MGMAT instructor reminded me of the three Cs: Correctness, Clarity, and Concision in class. In that order, you should look first for grammatical errors with the sentence, then meaning, and then wordiness. In this question, the sentence is testing your knowledge of modifiers and subordinate clauses and also verb tense. Try to notice one issue at a time, eliminate one wrong answer choice at a time, and then choose brevity over wordiness. My advice in this problem is to look at the meaning..."Clovis points are spear points with longitudinal groves"
and they were "named for the New Mexico site" even though they were found throughout North America. This is the intended meaning of the sentence. Hope this helps a little.

[dippradhan]

@drew.eng
Thanks for your suggestion.

[StaceyKoprince]

Thanks for weighing in, Drew

The "everything is underlined" and "big chunks of the sentence move around" questions are very difficult, yes.

You have gotten used to scanning for single word or maybe 2-word changes. That's good. Now, you need to expand that skill to entire phrases or clauses. Maybe an opening modifier is picked up and moved to the end of the sentence. Why? How does the placement of the modifier affect things? Noun modifiers are supposed to be next to what they modify, so that might give you one clue about what to examine.

In even harder ones, they may change around the roles of different parts of the sentence - a modifier may become the main clause and the main clause may become the modifier, for example. This only happens typically on the hardest questions, so what you do depends a bit on your goal. If you're not looking for a super-high verbal score, then maybe you don't care if they give you a couple of these - you just make sure that you guess before spending too much time.

If you are looking for a super-high verbal score, then you're going to have to learn how to break the sentence down into its component grammatical parts. We also have a workshop called the SC Slam (Quest for 750), and it teaches this Core / Modifier technique that I'm talking about.

First, as a general rule, this article discusses how to move through any SC problem:
http://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/2010/06/ ... on-problem

Note that scanning vertically (as discussed in the article) may require comparing big chunks of sentences, as I mentioned above, rather than just single words.

Next, I don't have an article that covers one of these "everything is underlined and moving around" problems, but I'll tell you what: I'll go find one in GMATPrep and write my next article about it, okay?

My next open publication date is 8 March (sorry it's so far out - that's what a publishing calendar is like!). Check the home page of http://www.beatthegmat.com on that day and you'll see the article. In the meantime, try to do it on your own, using what I talked about above (looking at phrases and clauses, not just individual words).

[dippradhan]

Stacey,
Thanks for your response. I can't wait to read your article.
Is there a way to find all your previous articles in BTG or in this forum?

Thanks,
Dipankar

[StaceyKoprince]

All MGMAT articles on BTG can be found here:

http://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/manhattan-gmat

(Note: this also includes articles from other MGMAT people.)

The articles on the MGMAT site are not listed by author - they're just listed by topic. You only see the author if you click on the article itself. But here is our Resources section:
http://www.manhattangmat.com/resources/

Note that 100% of my own articles are on the BTG site, but maybe only 40% of those same articles are on our site. We're still working on getting them all coded in and organized.