How you think through a question dictates how much time you will spend on different parts of a question stem and corresponding answer choices. This is the key for time management --
minimize the time you spend on parts of the question that don't matter!Here's a question from a student:
In this particular example - you should go into the answer choices with a sense of what's going on -- basically not enough qualified people to fill department positions.
A) - raise the minimum qualifications - is opposite of what you would expect/want. It's when you reduce the qualifications of being a department head that you open up more numbers of people are qualified - because now the qualifications are lower so more people are eligible.
But answer choice (A) says the opposite -- "raise" -- so this is opposite of what we want.
B) promoting current heads even higher is completely irrelevant. We only care about the department level. So this is not relevant.
C) Reduce responsibilities - is also not relevant. It doesn't matter what responsibilities are -- only thing we care about is qualifications.
D) Have super senior people go down one level to be come department heads -- well, now we have super senior people - who are eligible or qualified to be department heads. So yes, this is one possibility that would solve the problem. So that's your answer.
E) Avg number of employees per department is also completely irrelevant to qualifications of a department head.
So as you can see - GMAT is made up of a lot of answer choices that are opposite of what we want (A) -- or completely irrelevant (B), (C), and (E) -- and so the only answer left is (D) -- because it deals directly with qualifications. And yes, you can assume who is super senior is qualified to be a department head -- so they're capable of downgrading to department head -- but they won't do it.
Once you see this pattern - you will see it everywhere - and answers become that much easier to answer because you can now categorize answer choices mentally and dismiss them without reading the entire thing - saving you time.
For example, with (A) - -right when I saw "raise minimum qualifications" - I knew to eliminate (A) -- saving me time from reading the rest of the answer choice.
Here's another one - watch this video link:https://www.gmatpill.com/criticalreasoni ... Estate.mp4Here's a Google sheet with links to
OG SC video explanations that can help walk you through the thinking process:
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