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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24 Feb 2021, 09:22
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