Hi GMATNinja ,

I am stuck at V28 and my major issue is that I take approx. 2-3 mins on a difficult SC question (Your advice on CR and RC has really worked for me and really appreciate the videos you have put up on YouTube. They are truly GMAT gold). However, I have just 9 days left for my test, I have been following your advice from the youtube videos on SC but on my mocks I end up taking almost 2mins per SC question which leads to a time crunch in the second half of my test and I end up getting 5-6 incorrect in a row. What would you propose the best course of action would be now? Since the past 2 weeks I am solving all official questions for the second time and on an average I solve 20SC, 20CR and 2 RC passages a day. Should I continue this? What can I do more? I know I cannot magically improve to V40+, but I am targetting a V35.

Great question! You're right that given the choice between two equally logical, grammatically correct sentences, we'd prefer the more concise construction, but clarity is a whole lot more important than concision.

To see why, take a simple example:

"In 2018 the Boston Celtics won more games than they won in 2019."

Here, we're comparing how many games the Celtics won in 2018 to how many games they won in 2019. Perfectly logical comparison.

I could also write the sentence this way:

"In 2018 the Boston Celtics won more games than in 2019."

Because the prepositional phrase "in 2018" is modifying the succeeding clause and telling us when that action took place, it stands to reason that "in 2019" is doing exactly the same thing, so it's clear that we're still comparing how many games the team won in one year to how many games they won in another, even though I've removed the phrase "they won." Still a good comparison.

And while the GMAT would be unlikely to ask you to choose between this sentence and the previous one, I like that this one is shorter.

But watch what happens when I shorten the sentence to this:

"In 2018 the Boston Celtics won more games than 2019."

You can probably figure out what the sentence intends to convey, but there's a moment of confusion when we see "more than 2019." Wait, the Celtics won more than 2019 games!? (They have far too many chemistry issues to do that.) Because we've now shortened the sentence so much that it's become less clear, this construction is inferior to the previous two.

Same issue in your example. When I see the phrase "three times more than ten," I get tripped up and have to double back and re-read it to make sense of the sentence. But when I see "three times more than they did," the meaning is crystal-clear, and so this version is preferable.

I hope that helps!
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Sorry that I'm probably too late to helpful on this, divyajeswani! I think your test is... tomorrow?

It doesn't sound like you're looking for one, but just to be safe: there's no quick fix for verbal timing problems. All you can do is learn to be as efficient as you can, and then when you run out of time, you have no choice but to guess your way through the rest of them. More on that in this crusty old post.

The only real solution is simply to get more efficient at everything, and that's not usually something that happens quickly. On SC, it's possible that you're slow to notice straightforward, obvious opportunities to eliminate answer choices. It's also possible that you're just not a very fast reader, and maybe it takes you too long to sift through the meaning issues in SC questions. In either case, there's probably no quick fix that will move the needle in just a week or two. (And again, I realize that you have only hours left, not weeks.)

I wish that I could offer more! But it's really hard for me to know exactly why your speed is so slow, and really hard to recommend a course of action.

One last thought: if you have to guess on the final 5-6 questions, that's not going to destroy your chances for a 35+ on verbal. If you truly take care of business on the first ~30 questions, it would absolutely be possible for you to get into the mid-30s. Something in the 40s would almost certainly be out of reach, but the timing issues, by themselves, won't ruin your chances at a 35V.

Good luck on your exam, and sorry that I can't be more useful on this!
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Sorry to hear the bad news about the exam result! But great to hear that you're still going at it.

Two quick thoughts on this:

• Difficulty levels are determined empirically by the GMAT -- that's exactly what "experimental" questions are for. So just because a question looks easy to you may or may not mean that's it's actually rated as difficult by the exam. These things are very, very deceptive. So please don't EVER try to determine the difficulty levels of questions when you're taking the GMAT, because it's a complete waste of your time, and you'll often be very wrong about it. (The GMAT Club difficulty ratings, incidentally, are determined using a completely different algorithm than the actual exam. They're nice to have, but they aren't generally accurate, either.)
• I'll stand by what I said before: if you take care of business on the first ~30 questions, those last six will actually be difficult. Right now, you're getting your butt kicked by the first 30, so of course the last half-dozen are relatively easy. If you scramble to save time for the last six questions -- and miss a bunch of easier questions along the way -- it'll just make the problem worse: the end of the test will be even easier, and your low score will be even harder to change.

So again, there are no timing gimmicks that can help on verbal, unfortunately. The only real path forward is to get better and more efficient in general. The bottom line is that you need to get more of the first 30 questions right -- and you also need to get more efficient so that you can actually answer some of the final six questions. But the former is still far more important than the latter.

I hope this helps!
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For starters, I wouldn’t worry much about dashes. Grammar and style experts disagree about when it’s appropriate to use dashes, and I’ve seen no evidence that the GMAT is trying to test us on the “rules” for dash uses. Which is good, because there arguably aren’t any rules for dashes that are universally accepted.

In other words: the GMAT will never test you on the nuances of dash usage. So you should ALWAYS look for other decision points if you see a dash in the answer choices. (More on punctuation in general in this video.)

We can’t really say that dashes are specifically used as conjunctions (a conjunction is a word; punctuation is not), or that the usage of a dash always requires “that.” Most of the time, dashes just set aside some sort of modifier, and modifiers can take all sorts of forms.

Here’s the original sentence for the 2nd question you mentioned:

Notice that the dashes aren’t even underlined! They’re 100% irrelevant to us, since they appear in all five answer choices.

But what are the dashes doing? Well, they almost act like parentheses here. The author has a little bit more to say about heirloom tomatoes, and wants to imbed an additional clause in the middle of the sentence. But since it’s an incidental comment, it’s surrounded by dashes. Fair enough.

But again: who cares? The dashes aren’t underlined!

For the question in link #1, try ignoring the dash completely, and see if that allows you to arrive at the correct answer. I see clear errors – mostly related to meaning – in four answer choices. The fifth happens to begin with a “that” after the dash, but we don’t actually need to worry about that issue to get the question right.

And I’m not sure that the use of “that” is absolutely necessary in the correct answer. I’d be OK without it, to be honest. But you could argue that it helps the clarity a little bit, since the phrase starting with “that” is just another thing that the anthropologists believe: “Some anthropologists believe… that at some time in the past our ancestors suffered an event…”

But again, I wouldn't overthink it. There are more important decision points than the presence or absence of “that” after the dash.

Bottom line: you can basically ignore dashes, since the GMAT never really seems to test us on the correct use of dashes. Always look for other decision points first.

I hope this helps a bit!
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Ooh, good question, Samine. I'm not sure that you’ll ever see this particular issue again in an actual GMAT question, but it’s oddly interesting. My first instinct was that your explanations were spot-on, and it took me a while to figure out what was missing.

You’re right that the term “each other” would be used when there are at least 2 objects or people in a group. But the thing you’re missing is that “each other” suggests that everybody in the group is performing the same, reciprocal action. Using your examples:

“My friend, Nicole and I exchanged gifts with each other last Christmas.” – You and Nicole BOTH perform the action of exchanging gifts.
“[Everybody in] our group exchanged gifts with each other last Christmas.” – EVERYBODY in the group performs the action of exchanging gifts.

Back to answer choice (A) from the OG question:


(A) doesn’t quite make sense. “Each other” has to refer to “dance teams”, right? So then the sentence seems to say that dance teams represent their own chief at the court of other dance teams. And that’s pretty weird: have you ever heard of a dance team with its own royal court?

(Speaking as a veteran of quite a few dance companies: we were lucky if the dance company had its own dressing room, let alone a royal court. Once, I had to change costumes 17 times during a single show – and had to do the costume changes in a hallway. I am not making this up. There were also some very interesting wardrobe malfunctions on opening night, but you really don't want to hear about my accidental moments of near-nudity in front of live audiences…)

Anyway, (B) seems clearer: “another” can now refer to a chief, instead of a dance team. So now that makes sense: “dance teams represent their own chief at the court of another chief.” Nice.

And (C) is odd, too: “the other” suggests that there’s only one other chief, or one other dance team. Neither of those quite work: “dance teams represent their own chief at the court of the other chief…”? Which other chief? Or if it’s “dance teams represent their own chief at the court of the other dance team”, that’s still weird: which other dance team are we talking about?

So for that reason, (B) seems to be the best of the three.

I hope this helps!
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Before I say anything else: I’m not sure that the first one is legit! Question #2 is pretty close to the official version that appears in the verbal guide. I don’t know what’s up with that first one – it looks like some random person did some creative editing, and unless I’m missing something, I don’t think GMAC actually created that version, and I really don’t think (A) would be the right answer to it.

So unless somebody can verify the source, I’m going to completely ignore the first version you posted, because I really don’t think it’s correct.


This looks like a whole ton of overthinking to me, and an attempt to turn comparisons into iron-clad grammar rules. Unfortunately, that’s not really how the GMAT works. There’s only one real “rule” for comparisons on the GMAT: you need to choose the answer choice that most clearly and logically expresses the comparison.

Could a substantive clause be compared with a regular noun? Honestly, I’ve never had much reason to think about substantive clauses. I guess it wouldn’t be WRONG, exactly, to compare “numbers” to “what they were in the past”, or to say “the population of Japan doubled what it was in 2000.”

But why would we want to use those messy phrases when there are better alternatives? “The numbers were twice as great…” or “the population of Japan has doubled since 2000.” Much better, right? Even if the previous versions aren’t specifically violating any grammar rule.

It's not exactly the same issue, but you might benefit from reading this post or this post or this post about ellipsis, since those posts emphasize the fact that comparisons are about logic and clarity -- not mechanical rules. For a broader discussion of comparisons, you could suffer through this video and its sequel.

I hope this helps a bit!
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Hi GMAT Ninja,

I am a U.S. resident and have always had a knack for grammar. I scored a V38 on the GMAT a few days ago and usually score a bit higher (V40-41) on practice tests. This is all just using my ear for verbal. Can I get away with this and score V42-V43? SC is where I get the majority of my questions wrong. Anything specific I should learn in terms of technical SC techniques that are particularly helpful?

Best,
Michael

Thank you for writing in, Michael!

Have you already purchased an enhanced score report? If not, I would grab one ASAP. It's possible that SC isn't the problem, and your approach is working just fine -- which would mean that you need to sink your energy into RC and CR instead. Or the ESR might tell us that you're not doing so great on SC, and that your ear isn't really your friend on SC after all.

So go get some data, and go from there?

I hope this helps a bit!
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Hi
If you could help me with this-
(U)The compounds identified by MBR are often of lower quality than those identified by(U) MR.

Correction according to kaplan key-
MBR often identifies compounds that are of lower quality than those identified by MR.

how is it the original sentence wrong?
It says that it is not parallel.
I thought that "those" is parallel with compounds and "MR" with "MBR".

Posted from my mobile device