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GMATNinja
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All GMAT Ninja Complete Critical Reasoning Explanations 24 Feb 2021, 10:22
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All GMAT Ninja Complete Critical Reasoning Explanations


Fun fact: in 2020 alone, we posted about 530,000 words on the GMAT Club forum. Tolstoy’s War and Peace has about 560,000 words.

Gauntlet thrown: we’re coming for you, Tolstoy!

In all seriousness, our verbivorousness (which probably isn’t a word, but should be) admittedly makes it harder for GMAT Club members to find worthwhile things that we’ve posted on the forum. So here’s part 1 in our attempt to fix that problem: this is every complete GMAT Critical Reasoning explanation we’ve produced, broken down by source.


How to use these complete CR explanations


First of all: memorizing our explanations -- or anybody’s explanations -- is a total waste of your time, especially for verbal questions.

Why?

Nobody likes to hear this, but the vast majority of critical reasoning errors happen when the test-taker fails to catch the EXACT meaning of the passage, question stem, or answer choices. A good, full explanation will rephrase the text in nice, clear language. And if we do our jobs well as explanation-writers, you’ll easily understand why the OA is correct.

But after reading our CR explanations, will you be in a better position to understand the EXACT meaning of a totally different CR question? Probably not. You might pick up some good tips on how to structure your thinking, or how to think about the logic underlying a particular type of CR question. But studying our explanations won’t make you a better, more precise reader -- and it definitely won’t do much to help you figure out where YOU went wrong in terms of your reading process.

Instead, here’s how we recommend practicing critical reasoning -- or anything else on the GMAT:

  • After you’ve completed a set of practice CR questions, don’t review your mistakes (or read an explanation) right away. Instead, wait a few days, and then attempt the question again, doing your best to forget that you’ve ever seen it before.
  • If you easily answer the question correctly when you redo it, pay close attention to what you did differently the second time -- and work on making whatever went right part of your process EVERY time you do a CR question.
  • If you miss a question a second time, then reading a full explanation might help a bit. But keep in mind that your goal is to figure out where YOU went wrong, and how YOUR personal process can be optimized. So use our explanations as a tool for self-discovery -- not as a strict, step-by-step recipe.

Also, if you aren’t confident in your overall approach to critical reasoning, you might want to start with our beginner’s guide to CR, or our mountain of YouTube videos. We also discuss self-study strategies in depth in this video.

OK, rant over. Now, here’s the motherlode:


Recent Official Guide CR Questions (2020-present)


These are full explanations of CR questions that have appeared in the 2020 or more recent editions of the Official Guide. Fun!



Old Official Guide CR Questions (pre-2020)


The following are full explanations of CR questions that appeared in older OG editions, but not in the editions published since 2020:



Recent GMAT Verbal Review CR Questions (2020-present)


These guys appear in the 2020 or more recent versions of the GMAT Verbal Review guide:



Old GMAT Verbal Review CR Questions (pre-2020)


And these exciting things are full explanations of questions that appear in pre-2020 editions of the GMAT Verbal Review guide, but not in the more recent versions:



LSAT CR Questions


No, we’re not confused: we know that you’re (probably) studying for the GMAT, not the LSAT. But the LSAT can help a ton with your GMAT CR and RC studies -- click here for a long-winded rant on why LSAT questions can help with your GMAT studies.

And here are full explanations of some of our favorite LSAT CR questions:



GMAT Club Test CR Questions


If you’ve read a few of our forum posts, you probably know that we tend to discourage test-takers from relying on non-official GMAT verbal questions. GMAC spends literally thousands of dollars creating, testing, and perfecting each question that makes it into the exam; even the best test-prep companies can’t compete, and GMAT Club is (unfortunately!) no exception.

But if you’re here, odds are decent that you’re using the GMAT Club tests, so the list below features full explanations of some of our favorite CR questions from the GMAT Club tests. Full disclosure: we wrote or at least heavily edited most of these, but they’re still far from perfect. So please take them with a grain of salt.

Also, if you still plan to take the GMAT Club verbal tests, we’d recommend holding off on reading these explanations -- they’ll definitely bias your results.



Official MBA.com (formerly known as GMATPrep) CR Questions


Please be particularly careful with these!

The six official mba.com exams are the next-best thing to the real GMAT exam -- and if you’re already familiar with some of the questions, you’ll warp your results in unfortunate ways, as discussed in this article.

In other words: don’t read any of the full CR explanations on this list unless you’re SURE that you don’t plan to retake the mba.com exams.



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All GMAT Ninja Complete Critical Reasoning Explanations 24 Feb 2021, 19:19
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GMATNinja

Thank you for sharing this useful information at one page.
Hats off to you

Thank you once again
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Active GMAT Club Expert! Tag them with @ followed by their username for a faster response.
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All GMAT Ninja Complete Critical Reasoning Explanations 24 Feb 2021, 23:09
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Wow - this is really awesome and really helpful to have them on a single page!
:thumbsup:
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All GMAT Ninja Complete Critical Reasoning Explanations 25 Feb 2021, 04:46
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GMATNinja - Wow, Charles, wow! This post is invaluable; thank you so much for compiling everything in one place. I am sure every GMAT test taker will benefit from these explanations.
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All GMAT Ninja Complete Critical Reasoning Explanations 21 May 2021, 06:35
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Hi GMATNinja,

This is awesome stuff. Just to point out - the link to the "Sociologist: The more technologically" question under the LSAT category opens your excel file.
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All GMAT Ninja Complete Critical Reasoning Explanations 23 May 2021, 20:01
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VIVA1060
Hi GMATNinja,

This is awesome stuff. Just to point out - the link to the "Sociologist: The more technologically" question under the LSAT category opens your excel file.
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Thank you so much for catching that! The link is fixed now.
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All GMAT Ninja Complete Critical Reasoning Explanations 24 May 2021, 01:13
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Thank you very much GMATNinja...!!

Your posts are NOT only helpful in teaching/explaining concepts but also are engaging, full of fun and easy to understand. (Is the parallelism correct here?)

GMATNinja
Fun fact: in 2020 alone, we posted about 530,000 words on the GMAT Club forum. Tolstoy’s War and Peace has about 560,000 words.

Gauntlet thrown: we’re coming for you, Tolstoy!
Show more
:D


Honest and sincere thanks again for this and for all your contributions that are helping people like me.
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All GMAT Ninja Complete Critical Reasoning Explanations 28 Jun 2021, 11:46
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Hi! Is there a page similar to this but for Reading Comprehension?
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All GMAT Ninja Complete Critical Reasoning Explanations 28 Jun 2021, 12:38
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yahya729
Hi! Is there a page similar to this but for Reading Comprehension?
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Not yet! We don't exactly post full explanations for RC, since each passage has multiple questions, and a full explanation of ALL of them would take up too much space. But we're working on an RC compilation that will be the next-best thing -- basically, a "greatest hits" collection where you can find all of our full passage breakdowns, paired with explanations of at least some of the questions for each passage.

Stay tuned -- we'll hopefully have something ready within the next couple of months.
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All GMAT Ninja Complete Critical Reasoning Explanations 09 Oct 2025, 00:50
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