HOW TO DESTROY READING COMPREHENSION PASSAGES BY RHYME

Dear Rhyme,

I partially agree with your idea. This is exactly what I did to get a 29 in TOEFL ibt reading. I would call it a wise note-taking which can help you 1) grasp the whole idea by reading most important sentences and 2) navigate to the exact location of the detail asked in detail questions. However, it doesn't guarantee that you'll never need to return to text to read a FULL paragraph. My opposite idea is rooted in your sentence "the main point of each paragraph lies in the 1st sentence", which I believe not to apply to all paragraphs. The concluding sentence may be at least as important as the topic sentence to which you are pointing. To my mind, it's better to skim the rest of the sentence NOT just to hunt for numbers, specific names and so on but to get any info expected to help you answer the questions. There's no doubt that the 1st sentence (and the last of course) must be paid better attention compared to the middle sentences, but it doesn't mean that the middle sentences are inferior enough to be abridge to some discrete, isolated words. I believe investing on reading the passage is not sth to worry about since it can help you regain the lost time by not needing to flash back to the text when started to answer the questions.

I haven't yet started GMAT RC. I will later update when I have gone through it.

Dear Rhyme,

I partially agree with your idea. This is exactly what I did to get a 29 in TOEFL ibt reading. I would call it a wise note-taking which can help you 1) grasp the whole idea by reading most important sentences and 2) navigate to the exact location of the detail asked in detail questions. However, it doesn't guarantee that you'll never need to return to text to read a FULL paragraph. My opposite idea is rooted in your sentence "the main point of each paragraph lies in the 1st sentence", which I believe not to apply to all paragraphs. The concluding sentence may be at least as important as the topic sentence to which you are pointing. To my mind, it's better to skim the rest of the paragraph NOT just to hunt for numbers, specific names and so on, but to get any info expected to help you answer the questions. There's no doubt that the 1st sentence (and the last of course) must be paid better attention compared to the middle sentences, but it doesn't mean that the middle sentences are inferior enough to be abridged to some discrete, isolated key words. I believe investing on reading the passage patiently is not sth to worry about since it can help you regain the lost time by not needing to flash back to the text when started to answer the questions. To be more specific, I didn't get the meaning of ALGAE when reading your notes but immediately could guess the meaning while reading (not skimming the paragraph= not reading your notes= but reading the paragraph patiently).
Moreover, in this case, when you have both a mental map and notes at hand, you can start the question with higher self-confidence compared to when you jump to the questions with just some notes and a shattered understanding of the text (as you yourself have admitted in your post and my experience with ALGAE)


One point I wish to emphasize here is the importance of improving one skill in your reading, everybody! I would call it your mind's ability to control your eyes speed, or EMASA (Eye movement automatic speed adaptation), my own acronym . I DO believe that after reading enough of texts and getting familiar with question types, your eyes can be intelligently adjusting their own speed to reach a balance between time saving and good comprehension. That is, your reading style can be a combination of reading attentively and skimming at the same time, alternatively based on what you are reading at the moment. E.i. your eyes unconsciously know that they should speed down when reading through,say, definitions and they also know that they should speed up while reading about, say, an example of a phenomenon you just digested in the last sentence.

I haven't yet started GMAT RC. I will later update when I have gone through it. But this is what I have come to understand about RC after several years of voraciously reading English literature and other stuff (hold my BA in English literature). I don't consider a big difference between GMAT RC and other RCs expect the time constraint, which as I said can be alleviated by keeping in mind that spending on reading is compensated by a high ROI in answering the questions without referring to the text.

Hope it helps!

good comment
+1 kudo

I will give this approach a shot and see if I can find some improvement in RC! It has become my GMAT verbal nemesis!

Btw, is the Black Death passage a true GMAT passage? I would kill myself if something so dense shows up in my Test. I guess I can never get to the state where GMAT will dare present me this level of RC :p. But you never know with those stupid GMAT dummy questions, if GMAT decides to tease me with such a monster - I guess I should just skip in that case as I should be sure that it is a dummy question and I definitely don't deserve that respect of such a hard RC. BTW... WHAT DO YOU THINK OF SKIPPING, if you are SURE that you can't get such a hard question, so it has to be a test question?

the best strategy is do 10 RC daily in the last 30 days of exam...so that you keep momentum before exam in RC

Do you mean 10 RC questions or 10 passages? I will puke my stomach out if I did 10 passage a day :p, moreover these isn't as much RC material out there! I hope you mean 2-4 passage a day?

Thanks for the brief and the points you mentioned in addition to Rhyme's

Thanks Rhyme for the detailed info on the approach.
I think this is worth a try for everyone out there.

I would also request others who have followed this approach to post a few passages explaining their thought process. I am sure many people are still worried about the use of this technique for answering more general questions.
Rhyme has already explained one such question. But I would still want to have a few more samples explaining the method or approach to answer such questions.

Rhyme has already shown us the path. I cannot ask him to keep on explaining with more examples.
So I would really appreciate if others chip in with few more samples.

Thanks!

This technique is amazing.

Not sure what else to say. I was having difficulty with the MGMAT RC problem set questions until I began utilizing the method. My overall completion time for a set is down as well as my error rate.

Huge kudos for this!

Great style and thanks for the information. Even though the inital post is not fresh any more. I will try to practice this approach in my verbal prep periord over the next 3 weeks. THANKS!

Nice post... very well explanied how to deal with RC. Thanks

I was wondering how applicable this approach is to single dense paragraphs on the RC section.

I was looking at the 12th edition OG RC Q.50 and it's accompanying passage, and it's a killer of a one-paragraph only passage.

Any ideas on how best to tackle it?

To answer my own question, I experimented with the approach with single paragraph passages, and the best technique I've found is to seek out a natural break in the flow of the passage to mentally make it into a separate paragraph. It helps tremendously.

nice thread,.............

but i think for complex passages you can't skim otherwise you can't serach where to go back for specific question......

Hi Rhyme,

Of late we have been having RC passages which are only 1 or 2 paragraphs instead of traditional 3 or 4 paras, do you think the mentioned strategy would still work, coz in a 1 paragraph passage, with this strat you study the whole passage.Also I tried your strat for a couple of passages versus traditional "full reading", my hit rate was high only in full reading with both same time duration, does your strat takes more time to evolve?

hey. should we follow the same approach with short-passages as well? As in short-passages , reading through one para and just reading the first line of second para , doesnt really helps. one ultimately has to go through the second one.

Hi Rhyme.

I have been trying to adapt to your technique of solving RC's as they are my pain points too!! (. But I am not getting how can you effectively skim. I have tried a few times and i ended up reading the paragraph and then paraphrasing the whole of it. which obviously not the intent of this technique. I also ended up losing a lot of time paraphrasing the first paragraph too! While your notes look like sentences, my paraphrases looked like a mini paragraph in its own!!

Can you help me with some tips on paraphrasing and skimming. While practicing i also realized that there are 'types'of passages depending on the tone, detail, intent et al of the passage! Is your technique equally applicable to all types and kinds of passages irrespective of the type of content stated.

For e.g I tried this technique on the very first RC in OG 10

I am pasting the RC below. Can you help me do it your way. I wasted too much time owing to the number of Detail and specific questions. I did not have much trouble comprehending the passage, given that I am a science graduate but the chemical jargon made me lose my mind and i had to write down each such term in my paraphrase. So all in all - it dint work for me! Please help if your technique can help in such detail oriented paragraphs or no

READING COMPREHENSION
Passage 1
Caffeine, the stimulant in coffee, has been called
“the most widely used psychoactive substance on Earth .”
Synder, Daly and Bruns have recently proposed that
caffeine affects behavior by countering the activity in
(5) the human brain of a naturally occurring chemical called
adenosine. Adenosine normally depresses neuron firing
in many areas of the brain. It apparently does this by
inhibiting the release of neurotransmitters, chemicals
that carry nerve impulses from one neuron to the next.

(10) Like many other agents that affect neuron firing,
adenosine must first bind to specific receptors on
neuronal membranes. There are at least two classes
of these receptors, which have been designated A1 and
A2. Snyder et al propose that caffeine, which is struc-
(15) turally similar to adenosine, is able to bind to both types
of receptors, which prevents adenosine from attaching
there and allows the neurons to fire more readily than
they otherwise would.

For many years, caffeine’s effects have been attri-
(20) buted to its inhibition of the production of phosphodiesterase,
an enzyme that breaks down the chemical
called cyclic AMP.A number of neurotransmitters exert
their effects by first increasing cyclic AMP concentrations
in target neurons. Therefore, prolonged periods at
(25) the elevated concentrations, as might be brought about
by a phosphodiesterase inhibitor, could lead to a greater
amount of neuron firing and, consequently, to behavioral
stimulation. But Snyder et al point out that the
caffeine concentrations needed to inhibit the production
(30) of phosphodiesterase in the brain are much higher than
those that produce stimulation. Moreover, other compounds
that block phosphodiesterase’s activity are not
stimulants.

To buttress their case that caffeine acts instead by pre-
(35) venting adenosine binding, Snyder et al compared the
stimulatory effects of a series of caffeine derivatives with
their ability to dislodge adenosine from its receptors in
the brains of mice. “In general,” they reported, “the
ability of the compounds to compete at the receptors
40)correlates with their ability to stimulate locomotion in
the mouse; i.e., the higher their capacity to bind at the
receptors, the higher their ability to stimulate locomotion.”
Theophylline, a close structural relative of caffeine
and the major stimulant in tea, was one of the most
(45) effective compounds in both regards.

There were some apparent exceptions to the general
correlation observed between adenosine-receptor binding
and stimulation. One of these was a compound called
3-isobuty1-1-methylxanthine(IBMX), which bound very
(50) well but actually depressed mouse locomotion. Snyder
et al suggest that this is not a major stumbling block to
their hypothesis. The problem is that the compound has
mixed effects in the brain, a not unusual occurrence with
psychoactive drugs. Even caffeine, which is generally
(55) known only for its stimulatory effects, displays this
property, depressing mouse locomotion at very low
concentrations and stimulating it at higher ones.

1. The primary purpose of the passage is to
(A) discuss a plan for investigation of a phenomenon that is not yet fully understood
(B) present two explanations of a phenomenon and reconcile the differences between them
(C) summarize two theories and suggest a third theory that overcomes the problems encountered in the first two
(D) describe an alternative hypothesis and provide evidence and arguments that support it
(E) challenge the validity of a theory by exposing the inconsistencies and contradictions in it

2. According so Snyder et al, caffeine differs from adenosine in that caffeine
(A) stimulates behavior in the mouse and in humans, whereas adenosine stimulates behavior in humans only
(B) has mixed effects in the brain, whereas adenosine has only a stimulatory effect
(C) increases cyclic AMP concentrations in target neurons, whereas adenosine decreases such concentrations
(D) permits release of neurotransmitters when it is bound to adenosine receptors, whereas adenosine inhibits such
release
(E) inhibits both neuron firing and the production of phosphodiesterase when there is a sufficient concentration in
the brain, whereas adenosine inhibits only neuron firing

3. In response to experimental results concerning IBMX, Snyder et al contended that it is not uncommon for
psychoactive drugs to have
(A) mixed effects in the brain
(B) inhibitory effects on enzymes in the brain
(C) close structural relationships with caffeine
(D) depressive effects on mouse locomotion
(E) the ability to dislodge caffeine from receptors in the brain

4. According to Snyder et al, all of the following compounds can bind to specific receptors in the brain EXCEPT
(A) IBMX
(B) caffeine
210
(C) adenosine
(D) theophylline
(E) phosphodiesterase

5. Snyder et al suggest that caffeine’s ability to bind to A1 and A2 receptors can be at least partially attributed to
which of the following?
(A) The chemical relationship between caffeine and phosphodiesterase
(B) The structural relationship between caffeine and adenosine
(C) The structural similarity between caffeine and neurotransmitters
(D) The ability of caffeine to stimulate behavior
(E) The natural occurrence of caffeine and adenosine in the brain

6. The author quotes Snyder et al in lines 38-43 most probably in order to
(A) reveal some of the assumptions underlying their theory
(B) summarize a major finding of their experiments
(C) point out that their experiments were limited to the mouse
(D) indicate that their experiments resulted only in general correlations
(E) refute the objections made by supporters of the older theory""



Thank you