Experts' Topic of the Week, 5/29/17: No-BS Guide to GMAT Idioms

Experts’ Verbal Topic of the Week, May 29-June 2, 2017:

The No-BS Guide to GMAT Idioms

As far as I know, every available GMAT SC resource includes a huge pile of idioms. For example, MGMAT’s SC guide features more than 30 full pages of idioms, and Magoosh offers an entire 101-page(!) e-book on idioms alone. Both books are thoroughly well-researched and attempt to cover every idiom that has ever appeared in an official GMAT SC question.

The implicit message from the GMAT test-prep community: you should, apparently, memorize more idioms.

But I'm going to commit GMAT test-prep heresy this week: maybe you really don’t need to memorize every idiom you can find. And here’s why...

There are 25,000 idioms in English

Scholars disagree on the exact number of idioms in English, but I’ve seen estimates as high as 40,000. Wikipedia currently says that there are 25,000 idioms in English, so let’s go with that number. And in theory, all of those 25,000 idioms are fair game on the GMAT.

You could, of course, attempt to memorize all 25,000 of them. But you probably don’t want to do that, especially considering that sentence correction only accounts for around 1/3 of your verbal score -- and there are plenty of far more important SC topics to worry about.

But couldn’t I learn some idiom categories or rules?

Here’s the problem: an idiom is, by definition, an idiosyncratic expression that doesn’t strictly conform to any particular rules. Or here’s the official definition from the Oxford Dictionary: “a group of words established by usage as having a meaning not deducible from those of the individual words.”

So you can’t really memorize idiom rules, either. That’s the whole point: idioms don’t have rules. Sure, some idioms end up sounding similar to each other, but even that can be deceptive:

• Mike is thought to be the greatest living GMAT tutor. → correct!
• Mike is believed to be the greatest living GMAT tutor. → correct!
• Mike is considered to be the greatest living GMAT tutor. → crap… NOT correct
• Mike is considered the greatest living GMAT tutor. → correct

Unfortunately, we can’t really do much to streamline the process of learning idioms. So what can you do about them?

Advice for everybody: avoid “uncertain” idioms whenever you can

You might already have noticed this in our recent Questions of the Day, but in plenty of SC questions, you can safely avoid the idioms entirely if you’re not sure about them. In Monday’s example, the difference between “targeted at”, “targeted to”, and “targeted toward” was irrelevant. In Wednesday’s QOTD, we had no reason to care about the difference between “preference for” or “preference of”, because four of the answer choices included crystal-clear parallelism and subject-verb errors.

These examples aren’t unusual at all: in many official GMAT SC questions, you’ll find other errors that allow you to “work around” the idioms.

As a general rule for SC, you’ll always want to start by eliminating everything that you’re CERTAIN is wrong first. So if you’re CERTAIN that the idiom in a particular answer choice is wrong, go ahead and cross it out. But if you’re not certain about the idiom, see if you can find something else to work with – either a clear, concrete grammar error, or a problem with the meaning or logic of the sentence.

I’ll be honest: avoiding the idiom only works most of the time – not all of the time. Yes, there are tons of official questions that allow you to safely ignore the idioms (some of our favorite examples can be found here, here, and here). But sometimes, you simply can’t avoid the idiom. Official examples are fairly rare, but two of them can be found here or here.

Advice for native speakers: don’t memorize

If you’re worried about that relatively small number of “unavoidable” idioms on GMAT SC questions, then you might wonder if memorizing idioms is worth your time. And if you’re a native English speaker, memorizing idioms probably won’t give you a great return on your investment.

Think of it this way: verbal is only half of your composite score, SC is only around 1/3 of your verbal score, and idioms are just a tiny piece of the battle on SC. Time spent learning idioms is time that you’re not spending on more important concepts, like parallelism or pronouns or modifiers or comparisons. Or CR or RC or math.

And there’s no guarantee that the idioms you study will be the same idioms that appear on the actual exam. Again, there are somewhere around 25,000 idioms in English, and any of them are fair game on the GMAT. It would be difficult to memorize more than about 1% of them.

And if you’re a native speaker, you definitely didn’t learn English by memorizing lists of words and expressions. It probably won’t be terribly effective to suddenly start doing so now, partly because memorizing idioms will feel like a deeply, deeply unnatural task.

To be fair, if you miss an idiom once on a practice question, go ahead and commit it to memory, just in case you see that very same idiom again on your actual exam. But other than that, you won’t get much bang for your buck by memorizing lengthy lists of idioms if English is already your mother tongue.

Advice for non-native speakers: memorize only if you have spare time

Most of our advice for native speakers applies to non-native speakers, too. Your GMAT study time is incredibly valuable, and the question of whether to memorize idioms is ultimately a question about return on investment. And for most non-native speakers, your time will be better spent on any number of other verbal-related tasks: understanding modifiers or comparisons or parallelism or pronouns, or practicing some good, hard CR questions, or just getting better at reading.

But if you actually enjoy memorizing lists of phrases – and if you’re madly devoted to doing EVERYTHING you possibly can to increase your verbal score (like this legendary guy who spent four years studying to get his 760) – then it might not hurt to memorize a few idioms.

In other words, if you’re committed to studying for hundreds or even thousands of hours, then maybe a few dozen hours of idiom memorization isn’t a big deal.

Just don't be too shocked if the 300 idioms you memorize don’t happen to appear in the 17 or so SC questions you see on your actual exam. And if you’re brand-new to SC – or if you don’t intend to spend THAT many hours studying for the GMAT verbal section – then your time will probably be better spent elsewhere.

In the long run: hope for non-native speakers

If you’re struggling in general with your fundamental reading skills, you might have already committed to a long-run strategy of doing a lot of good, hard reading in English. (Please see last week’s Ultimate Guide to RC for Beginners for more on this issue.) If that’s the case, then your grasp of English idioms will also improve as you get more exposure to the language – even if you never even touch a list of idioms. So don't lose hope!

GMAT Club resources

Even though I’m not a huge fan of memorizing idioms, GMAT Club – as always! – has your back if you want to give it a shot, or if you just want more general advice for GMAT sentence correction.

• if you’re relatively new to SC, start with the Ultimate Verbal Study Plan
• if you’re just looking for more SC practice, check out carcass’s legendary directories
• if you absolutely can’t resist, here’s one list of idioms
• if you’re truly addicted, here are more idioms
• if you want to improve from great (760) to incredible (780) on SC (probably without memorization!), click here

And as always, feel free to join us for our live Wednesday verbal chats if you have questions about idioms or any other GMAT verbal topic: https://gmatclub.com/forum/verbal-chat- ... 78-20.html. And live GMAT Club verbal YouTube chats are coming soon!