bsaikrishna wrote:
Hi,
I am an Indian student and I am preparing to give my GMAT in 2-3 months time.
I am looking forward to get a score of 750+ very seriously.
One of the topics that I am facing a problem is RC.
I observed that I generally do well in RC, when I read the passage twice.
Because on the first time, I can get an idea about what is the passage about and how it is moving.
In the second read, I understand the deeper elements of the RC and can tackle the questions well.
But the problem is - this is taking more time for me.
I tried some other strategies, but this seems to work for me better than any other.
Now, considering that I cannot spend time to read the passage twice.
What should be my strategy be? How should I work towards my RCs?
Please help me regarding this issue.
Thank you
Krishna
The key is to know what to read and what not to read----carefully, that is. Indeed, there aren't many good resources on RC as it's not easy to show you these tricks.
GMATPill’s Four Reading Comprehension Tips:1. Pretend you’re REALLY engaged in the passage. REACT to emotions in the passage, focus on words that express the author’s opinion about the topic and internalize that perspective. After reading halfway through sentences, ask yourself WHY the author is feeling the way he/she is feeling
2. Focus on the first topical sentence of each paragraph and CONNECT THE DOTS to figure out what the story of the passage is. Don’t just skim, you need to DISSECT that sentence – on first read you’ll often miss the point. If you focus on that sentence, you almost don’t need to read the rest of the paragraph.
3. CUT THE FLUFF. In order to dissect that first sentence, you’re going to need to CUT THE FLUFF. That means, take out any extraneous adjectives that are great to know, but for the purpose of understanding the author’s point, it helps to skip over these words and focus on the key words in the sentence. Once you take enormously, extraneously, and excessively descriptive words out of a sentence, you can understand more clearly the author’s intention and purpose in writing.
4. Focus on key connecting phrases. After that first sentence that you dissect, you’ll need to focus on key connecting phrases as you skim from sentence to sentence. Often times, a simple glance at a transitive phrase can help you guess what the rest of the sentence is *probably* going to talk about, as well as what the rest of the paragraph is going to continue talking about. You know these future sentences are probably going to either support or refute, so figure out what direction is going and just focus on that. Don’t read into details. That’s for the losers.
We at GMATPill took the time to teach you how to identify the important parts of an RC passage and how to focus on that part.
Feel free to look at these 2 RC passages.