srini123 wrote:
Congrats great score...
please share whats the secret behind ur V49, man !!! that is awesome .....
r u native english speaker?
No, English is my second language, and in fact I speak with a noticeable accent. I consider my reading and understanding of written English strong though.
A lot of people reported problems with pacing the verbal section. If you have pacing problems my advice is to to learn to skim-read literature. By skim-reading I mean being able to glance over the structure of a sentence or paragraph, identify key words, and build a mental image of the argument's structure, without necessarily even understanding the meaning behind it. This helps a lot on sentence correction, and sometimes on paragraph questions as well, since the answer often depends more on the structure of the sentence(s) than the meaning behind them.
If you were a recent undergrad student, this may remind you of "cramming" for an exam, when your main objective is not to understand the subject (which presumably you already do) but to memorize as much terminology and content in a minimum amount of time, so you can spew it out for the test. When you make yourself read 100 pages of a technical textbook in 2 hours (and memorize the fine details), you are forced to learn to skim-read.
Do this for a while and soon you will notice several things. First of all, your reading and comprehension speed increases, perhaps at the expense of long-term memory and understanding, but remember that for the GMAT you don't need to remember a question once it's answered! Secondly, you will learn to quickly identify keywords, both technical and linguistic, and quickly be able to convert a sentence into a logical structure with a meaning and a direction it's taking.
I haven't tried this myself, but you can design a series of exercises on speed reading. Take any book you want (obviously one with academic paragraphs similar to those on GMAT is best for practice). Start a fast timed reading of a paragraph (you must read the entire paragraph in the set time, and extending the time limit is not allowed. If you have to skim or skip some sections then do it). Then on a fresh piece of paper, without looking at the text, answer questions such as: "what is the author's main point", "give 3 or more subpoints the author used to base his argument on", "list the most important technical terms the author used", etc. The key is speed. Do it for a while and then start shortening your allowed time, and keep doing that until you can read and be ready to (correctly) answer the questions of a middle-sized paragraph in under a minute, or even less. In the process, you'll learn to "skim" over the unimportant filler, and be able to quickly fish out the most important content. Yes, you will lose some meaning in the process, but often such fine details are unnecessary to answer the question (other times they are, so you just have to practice until you get the hang of it).
Oh, and you need a fluent or near-fluent general knowledge in written English for this to work (write it as well as your native language, and be able to "think" in it as you solve problems). If English is
noticeably foreign/awkward for you to use (as in you struggle to understand general sentences, or still tend to think in your native non-English language while reading English text), you need to get it to near-fluent level before you can start working on pacing and speed-reading.
On sentence correction, mentally simplifying the sentence is the key. It's wordy and ambiguous for a reason. Once you can mentally shape that stream of unwieldy words into a logical structure, you'll be able to easily discard sentence corrections when a potential choice's structure doesn't make sense. Secondly, "speak" the questions out loud in your head. Obviously you aren't allowed to speak in the exam room, but even mentally trying to "speak" and not just read the sentence will often make you think, "hey, this doesn't sound right" and discard the choice. Only try to do this if you no longer have pacing problems, as this can make answering the question actually longer.
Other than that, not sure what to add... Just practice a lot of reading, do the GMATprep and the verbal
gmatclub tests, read some good prep books, etc.