"If you're not a native speaker, you should focus on improving your general English competence first before doing GMAT. You know the bias is there - it's like taking a German version of GMAT without speaking German quite well. Kinda a problem, huh? If you have problem with GMAT verbal, you probably have problem with TOEFL as well - which will altogether reduce your probability of getting into a top school.
I don't know how much time you still have left. If you can still tolerate a bit of waiting - I suggest that you read magazines, starting from Newsweek, New Statesman, TIME, to more sophisticated ones such as Economist and Foreign Affairs (by council on foreign relations) . But I have no way of knowing if these are available at all at your place. WSJ and NYTimes are good stuff, too and you can just skim them every day - there are always new articles.
From my experience, an ESL student has pretty noticeable English improvement after reading these magazines for an extended period of time, say, 6-12 months. But you shouldn't expect to have a sharp improvement in, say, 2 weeks or even 10 weeks of cram. Don't waste time on fiction - novels are always written in lightheaded, if not frivolous prose that sound like daily conversations. I was just picking up "The bonfire of vanities" - supposedly a I-Banking classic on the masters of the universe, and I find the prose disgusting. Sounds like some fool babbling on the street. The Economist is widely regarded as well-written, and they even have a style guide for sale (style, as in good way of writing). For books, pick up some history or political science books. For one with more dense prose, try George Soros' "Alchemy of Finance" -which both appeals to business interest (finance that is) as well as practicing enduring boring academic writing.
Also try :
https://www.the-american-interest.com/contents.cfm"
"You really probably just haven't read enough. Let me tell you my story. I'm a native English speaker, but I spent countless - day and night - hours reading stuff : US history, European history, politics, economics. Mostly books. The purpose? To bolster my SAT reading and writing score. You know the benefit of reading a lot, I mean a lot = reading one book a day consistently, that is 360+ books per year. The only drawback of that is the high cost - at one point I'd spend over $1000 per month just to buy books. At the end, I had so many examples to write on my SAT writing that I didn't even bother looking at any "strategies", "formula" ...\
On the exam, I just started throwing everything I read from whichever source, and I ended up writing more words than allotted - of course, I scored a 12 out of 12 (which is the same as 6.0 on AWA) For the SAT reading, I scored a 780 (out of 800), with not too much prep either.
Buy a Kindle (
https://www.amazon.com) if you have the opportunity. Saves you a lot of money, a $25 hardcopy is $9 on Kindle - you can always read it in a day and return it the next day for full refund. The good thing about Kindle is that it's thin and light - you can read while eating at a restaurant. My favorite route every day is to walk out and take the subway to a Whole Foods Market (where I can get countless fruits, smoothie and other goodies) , sit down with my book, eating, reading, eating, reading. Repeat the pattern every day. You can also hold the device without much pain while you're on the train - on the beach, anywhere. ALSO, it has a built-in dictionary that allows you to learn words way faster than reading off a paper back, for which you'd have to aid with an external dictionary to look up for words.
There's a reason why SAT verbal is highly correlated with socio-economic status of the individual in question. It is because that in high SES households, there tend to be a lot more books available. Moreover, books tend to be expensive, out of the reach of working class Americans. More analysis see Charles Murray's "Coming Apart" :
https://www.amazon.com/Coming-Apart-Stat ... 0307453421
Overall: Just Read. "
"no I'm not a teacher...I'm entering college this fall, so a student.
Also: don't try to save $5 on a $200,000 degree such as MBA. WSJ online costs $108 to subscribe to, the Economist, $135, NYTimes, probably $200. Pay the money, otherwise you're not gonna get superior service.
In fact, it is generally a bad idea to skip subscriptions of these papers at all at any time. Without reading NYT/WSJ every day, you're blind and deaf - when you try to have an intelligent, informed conversation with anybody, whether it is your friend, your co-worker, someone you just met a cafe, you'd lose big time.
If you think about it this way, newspaper and magazine subscriptions are not just must-have, but also value investments at a bargain. An average preparatory school in New England (for example, Choate, Andover, or St.Albans in DC) costs $48,000 per year tuition and boarding. So the total cost of education for a kid from age 12 to 17 is about 5 * that amount, or $220,000. Let's say that's 200 grand. But if you're from a family of obscure and impoverished background (let's say, income lower than $80,000 per year), you'd get full ride for these schools because they have general endowments. So if you had read extensively prior to age 12, you'd probably outperform 95% of the kids who take that exam, taking a full-ride of $50000 per year for five years until college. An investment of $1000 on newspapers and magazines amounts to about just 1.5% of the total annual family take-home pay - tiny. I'm only explaining this concept for low-income households, because the rich don't give a damn about $1000 - they burn it for fun. "
close
10 Jun 2012, 08:50
Similarly, this increased understanding of Assumptions has also helped in S/W questions. 
