taorishrushti wrote:
I've often read everywhere speaking about 3 Approaches for RC-
1. Reading the questions first
2. Deeply reading the passage first
3. Skimming the passage in first few seconds and then solving question by question referring back to the passage every time a new question comes
Approach 1 suits only when the questions are fact based, which are rarest to be found in GMAT, so this fails!
I thought approach 2 would work wonder for me, but then while solving it, I realized missing some points while reading the passage, which then appears in the question and compels me to refer back to the passage, consuming a lot of time plus nullifying the motto of the approach.
Approach 3 - This one then I tried. But took a lot of time to get acquired to this, even I ain't now, for which I'm here.
What exactly does skimming mean? How much time one should give to the initial skimming? I exactly thought that this is the one meant for me as I wanted this every time. But then this required a well practised disciplined approach, which comes by practice I guess. But how to start with this? Moreover, every time I try this approach, I end up loosing minutes to skim, probably because I don't know what exactly is skimming.
Please help me out!
Hi taorishrushti,
I would not suggest you to do skimming as the GMAT RC questions test your inferential skills. And skimming is not recommended for detailed based questions also as you will not be reading the passage for every question. The right process approach RC questions is to:
- Read the passage
- Understand the purpose of the each sentence
- Draw inferences from each para
- Summarize the para once you finish reading it
- Derive the main point by summarizing the summaries of individual paras
- If you come across any details while reading the passage, skip them for the moment as you can always come back to that specific part if you need to solve detail based questions
- Once you finish reading the passage, read the question stem
- Go to the relevant area of the passage and make sure you draw the right inferences
- Eliminate answer choices carefully (either irrelevant, out of scope or opposite choices)
This is how you should read a passage and solve the questions. If you learnt the right methods to read the passage and to eliminate answer choices, then I would suggest you to practice a few passages without any time limit. Focus on solving the passages using the right methodology. Once you start getting a decent accuracy, then you can take timed quizzes.
Hope it helped. Feel free to get in touch if you need any further help with the study strategy.
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