unable to read the entire passage--- Takes 5 - 7 mins a pass

[narayanan83]

Hi

I had purchased the verbal set of MGMT.. CR is fine. I took the question bank with 120 sec per question and that it fairly ok.. But I have great problems with the RC. I am unable to read the entire passage, and moreover the book says that we require to take key points( They work though). I tend to spend a lot of time.. Some times 5 - 7 mins a passage.. This kills time. Is there any way out of this and I find the inference questions tough.. IS there any method to read quickly or something that is effective..

Regards
Narayanan

[StaceyKoprince]

There is - but you're going to have to mentally get used to the fact that you will NOT understand everything you read.

Your goal on that first read-through is to understand ONLY the main points of each paragraph. You do not even want to understand all of the detail. You just want to know where the detail is located, so that you can go back and learn it IF you get a question about it.

Your thought process for a particular paragraph might be something like:
Okay, first sentence says that farmers have increased their use of some pesticide [they gave me the name but I don't care what the name is] over the last decade, and bees have been dying in great numbers. WRITE: pest. = bad for bees
Second sentence says bees get disoriented and can't find their way back to the hive. WRITE: bees confused --> lost
Then the next sentence starts to explain in detail how the pesticide affects the bees' central nervous system. I don't care about that detail now - I don't want to know how the pesticide affects the bees. I just want to know that this info is in this paragraph. I skim the rest of the paragraph and see that it's just more detail. Forget it.
WRITE: how pest. hurts bees...
and now I'm moving on to the next paragraph.

There's TONS of info there that I don't know - but that's okay. I don't want to bother learning it unless I get a question about it. Generally, there are about twice as many questions written for a passage as will be given to you. So there's actually a pretty good chance you'll never have to learn that info! And if you DO get a question on that topic, you now know where to quickly find the relevant sentences and then you can learn what you need to know!

RC inference (and CR draw a conclusion questions) aren't really asking you to infer something, in the way that we do in the real world.

For example, if I tell you that I think cats make the best pets, you might infer in the real world that: I like animals in general; I like pets in general; I have a cat; I have other kinds of pets; I like other kinds of cats (lions, etc); if we went to a pet store and I bought a pet, that pet would be a cat; if I came over to your house and saw your cat, I would pet it and play with it; etc. But not one of those would be acceptable as a GMAT inference answer! Instead, an acceptable answer might be something like: I don't think dogs make the best pets; at least one other type of pet is better than dogs; some other types of animals besides cats can act as pets; etc.

The "real world" inferences aren't acceptable because you could argue with any one of them. I might like only cats and no other animals or pets. I might like only house cats and no other kinds of cats. I might be allergic to cats and therefore don't have a cat, wouldn't choose a cat if I were at a pet store, and wouldn't pet or play with yours. (By the way, large parts of this scenario are true! I do think cats make the best pets - at least, they'd be the best for me - and yet I am actually allergic to them.)

The "GMAT inference" examples are acceptable because you can't argue with them. If I think cats are the best, then by definition, I don't think some other type of pet is best, and any other type of pet is not as good as cats. By the same token, if I think cats are the best, then I must accept that there are other types of pets - "best" is a comparison, so I must be comparing to other types.

So that's the standard we have to hold ourselves to on inference questions: is this something I can PROVE based on some information in the passage?

[narayanan83]

Hi Stacey

Thanks for the reply....

Hmmmm The RC method(skimming) that u suggested works. Still I am working on with the online RC question bank and OG questions.

Can you help me with the time aspect??:(

Is it fine taking 4 Min for a entire passage and then 1.20 sec for the each of the following question??. How will we know the number of questions that would come for a passage while taking the real GMAT is there any indication on the screen??

Thanks
Narayanan

[StaceyKoprince]

With any strategy, the exact details of what works best can vary from student to student. I still don't recommend taking 4 minutes and then 1:20 per question, though. There are going to be some questions that take longer - nothing you can do to avoid them.

I will mention that it typically takes several weeks of practice with the "skimming" method (I call it the "outline" method) before people are able to hit the timing guidelines. So maybe you just haven't practiced enough with it yet - keep going. Don't forget to review - constantly ask yourself, after you've done a passage and questions, what you could have done to be more efficient. If you went into too much detail on your first read-through, be very conscious of that - point it out to yourself, figure out how you should have known not to go into so much detail, etc.

We don't know how many questions we'll get - they don't tell us. You'll get either 3 or 4; that's all you know. By the way, when working from OG, they give you (typically) 6+ questions. Don't do them all - do only 3 (for shorter) or 4 (for longer). Save that passage to do again down the road, after you've forgotten a lot of it. (There's a major advantage when answering 5+ questions: the more questions you answer, the easier it is to answer them because you have a lot of knowledge about the passage already. That will never happen on the real test because you'll only have 4 questions max. So don't do more than 4 at a time for one passage in practice.)