Most important step in RC - Practice questions Mon Wed Fri

Thank you very much for your response!
I thought that with the new format there would be fewer passages...


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Hi Raj319,

I would suggest you be a little more specific in your summaries so that you come up with a better and shorter summary. That would help you in retaining more information in your mind; not to forget, you will also understand the main point of the entire RC.

In your point 1 "despite Islam had the chance to transform as per the host society" is nothing but the restatement of the very first line of the 1st para. Think, does this contribute to the overall understanding? In my opinion, it doesn't. 1st para is about presenting a few facts and then revealing that there are 2 laws in UK: UK's law and Sharia. So, your summary should be somewhat on "local Muslim societies are operating under their own laws" line. Don't be in a hurry to write something just for the sake of summarizing. Read then summarize!

in point #2, is any "broad" solution mentioned in the para? In fact, it's the opposite. Following point is quoted from the RC:

It is stating that a big issue should be broken down. They aren't looking for a "broad" solution, right?

point #3 and main point are good!

I hope that helps!
All the best.

1 looks good
2 could have been better. It's not summarizing the entire para. Besides, "investigation of sharia law by Govt" is just a line mentioned in the para. para 2 talks about the sharia councils in order to show that 2 legal systems are there in UK. Raj319, summarized it in a very good manner. The entire para talks about councils and how steps have been taken to 'control' the sharia law.
In your 3rd point "reform of unregistered marriages" seems to be stating that the related laws have already been reformed. This is not correct. "marriage" is just used as an example.

you are thinking in the correct direction but remember these small points while summarizing!

All the best.

Exercise for 13 November 2018

Note: Try to summarize the following paragraphs below individually and then try to come up with a single line summary/title for the extract. I strongly encourage you to do this exercise mentally - without writing the summaries anywhere. Once done, type your summary/title below and read the article and it's title and match the article's summary with yours. Both the summaries should be close enough. Try to time yourself - take no more than 3 minutes to complete this activity.

Sample:
Most of the competition and rules in Europe were regulated by the academic profession and bureaucratic rules set by the state, with higher education institutions playing a secondary role. The more extreme case was probably France: until 1968, the main pillars of the French university system were discipline-based faculties. Disciplines were the relevant level of regulation of the academic profession, and a discipline-based national body (the CNU, National council of universities), not universities, managed academic careers. As shown by Terry N. Clark, by the beginning of the 20th century, in social sciences the (naturally) male and Parisian ‘patron’ was central to the career and provision of resources for his ‘circle of disciples’, i.e. the numerous fellows waiting for the patron to grant them a position or promotion. In a recent paper, Jérôme Aust and Emmanuelle Picard also described the very active and prominent role that French ‘mandarins’ played at the end of the ‘50s, when project-based funding first developed. France’s extreme case of professor-based regulation of scientific competition—and the related absence of universities—also occurred in other parts of continental Europe, until recently. As stressed by Jürgen Enders and Ulrich Teichler, in the mid-1990s Germany saw strong competition among professors while universities were all considered as equivalent. This was also true for many other European countries, with the exception of the UK, where the higher education landscape has long been stratified.

The European situation is therefore quite different from the trajectory experienced by US higher education institutions. As shown by Burton Clark, US higher education institutions were often created through private individual initiatives, and developed strong institutional identities relying on what Burton Clark described as organizational sagas (1972). Unsurprisingly, the first institutional rankings emerged in the USA by the end of the 19th century with the Commission of the US bureau of education. This was repeated at the beginning of the 20th century by the psychologist James Catell and by the Chicago Tribune in 1957, until US News and World report was published in 1983. At that time the editors of US News, ‘decided to invest in educational rankings, as a way to distinguish themselves from their rivals by offering “news you can use”’. They have published rankings every year since.

This phenomenon has slowly spread to Europe over the last two decades. A first factor is the reforms implemented by most European countries to transform universities into organizations, and to increase universities’ managerial autonomy and institutional autonomy. The development of evaluation and accreditation agencies across Europe further reinforced the idea that training and research were not only individual-based but also institution-based. In the UK, the 1980s saw the introduction of the Research Assessment Exercise to evaluate university departments, allowing for a classification of institutions according to the grades they received. By the late 1990s, Germany’s CHE (center for higher education), a higher education think tank funded by the Bertelsmann foundation, had published the first rankings of German departments and universities, giving lie to the idea that all German institutions were alike. This trend intensified when the Shanghai ranking and other international rankings further emphasized the institutional level in their assessment of institutions. In other words, competition is no longer limited to individuals and nations; it has become multilevel. Competition cannot solely be approached at the individual level but rather must simultaneously be addressed at the individual, national and institutional levels, yielding a complex interplay between these different levels.

As competition between research universities intensified, the locus of this competition shifted from the national to the supranational level. Regions and nations are still competitive spaces for most universities, but the most successful institutions are no longer engaged in a national contest: they compete globally. Their teaching no longer aims to solely train nationals, but also ‘citizens of the world’. Their student body and faculty are less and less national, their research addresses international issues rather than purely domestic matters, and they are less dependent on national funding and authorities as they have managed to secure other sources of funding (often from the tuition paid by their international students). Thus, global, national and regional competitive arenas are intertwined. Global institutions do not primarily compete for their country but for themselves and against similar institutions. They expand to foreign countries where they develop branches, they recruit staff and students from around the world and they don’t depend on the resources of their national stakeholders as much as other institutions. Just like premier league soccer teams, their main competitors are outside national borders: although the nationality of the most renowned research universities is linked to the territorial location of their headquarters, the nationality of their students and staff depends on the competitive arena in which they operate as institutions, i.e. either the regional, national or global arena.

Thanks gmatexam439 this is really helpful

Pls. review.

1. Europe- Individual based competition (especially male)
2. US- Institute based competition & Rankings introduction
3. Europe transformed from Individual --> Inst. level & Rankings
4. Inst. competition evolved from local to global level

Into of inst. rankings and their evolution to global scale

Para1 - Studies suggest the enhancing visual imagery effects of LSD and psilocybin consumption.
Para2 - Further reports and evidences that suggest subjective experience of color and light with the objects in one's surrounding as an effect of Psilocybin and LSD consumption are mentioned.
Para3 - The objectivity of visual improvement experiences, increase in the richness and vividness of colour experienceare put into a grayish area, referring the studies that show reverse unparallel results.

para 1: educational universities in europe competed domestically,were male dominant and considered equal in some countries
Para 2: educational universities in US were diffrent to europe. They were ranked .
Para: europe,china starts to follow us Model and begin to rank Instituitions
para 4: Universities compete in the international level and students and teachers are from all over the world instead of from the same nation.

Summary: the evolution of competitions between universities

Exercise for 26 November 2018

Note: Try to summarize the following paragraphs below individually and then try to come up with a single line summary/title for the extract. I strongly encourage you to do this exercise mentally - without writing the summaries anywhere. Once done, type your summary/title below and read the article and it's title and match the article's summary with yours. Both the summaries should be close enough. Try to time yourself - take no more than 3 minutes to complete this activity.

Sample:
The eighteenth century saw some of the most significant changes to childbirth care in Britain before the twentieth century, and included the emergent popularity of the man-midwife, formal training in obstetrics for surgeons, and the establishment of lying-in hospitals in urban areas, particularly in London. Despite these changes, the vast majority of women of the lower orders of society were attended by female midwives during labour and delivery throughout the century. Skilled midwives were thus undoubtedly ubiquitous in early modern British society. Their presence can be found in a range of archival sources, and social, cultural and medical historians of early modern England have utilised these for diverse histories of childbirth. Welsh sources have not been considered in any of these studies, and therefore the nature of childbirth in early modern Wales remains largely unknown.

Evidence of midwives in Wales can be found in a wide range of documents, including applications for licences to practice midwifery, Court of Great Sessions and quarter sessions records, parish overseer, churchwarden and vestry accounts, as well as burial records and wills. Only ten applications for licences to practise midwifery have survived in the Welsh ecclesiastical records held by the National Library of Wales, and found in the collections for the diocese of Bangor and Llandaff. Many more were likely produced, however the survival rate for such documents in Wales is poor. Court of Great Sessions records have a much greater rate of survival, and midwives appear frequently as witnesses in the approximately 140 infanticide cases included in the Crime and Punishment database between 1730 and 1800. Twelve of these cases have been examined here. Quarter sessions records from across Wales have also survived to varying degrees and are held in county archives offices. The session rolls of the Montgomery quarter sessions from the 1750s to 1790s have been examined for this study. Finally, parish overseers of the poor, churchwarden and vestry accounts survive with varying quality for parishes across all Welsh counties, and contain hundreds, if not thousands, of references of payments made to midwives for the delivery of pauper women. For this study, the accounts of 23 parishes across four Welsh counties have been analysed.

Exercise for 28 November 2018

Note: Try to summarize the following paragraphs below individually and then try to come up with a single line summary/title for the extract. I strongly encourage you to do this exercise mentally - without writing the summaries anywhere. Once done, type your summary/title below and read the article and it's title and match the article's summary with yours. Both the summaries should be close enough. Try to time yourself - take no more than 3 minutes to complete this activity.

Sample:
OLDER people are often perceived as lonely, hopeless, and sad. Even older adults who report high levels of satisfaction frequently express beliefs that most other older people are not faring well. In the last decade, however, research has shown that such negative views are unwarranted. Although many people are, indeed, facing mounting physical ailments, psychological stress, social losses, and increased dependency at the very end of life, most older people are well adjusted emotionally for the bulk of their later years (e.g., Carstensen, Pasupathi, Mayr, & Nesselroade, 2000). Naturally, individual differences are apparent: Improvements to well-being are general trends, not guarantees. Dispositional tendencies, life events, and individuals’ management of such events can all influence whether well-being improves or deteriorates with age. Nevertheless, research suggests that reasonably high levels of affective well-being and emotional stability are the norm rather than the exception at least until after adults reach 70 or 80 years of age (e.g., Carstensen et al., 2000, 2009; Charles, Reynolds, & Gatz, 2001; Kessler & Staudinger, 2009; Kunzmann, Little, & Smith, 2000; Mroczek & Kolarz, 1998; Teachman, 2006). Only when people are essentially dying does “terminal” drop in affective well-being appear consistently and is largely independent of age.

At first sight, the trajectory of emotional aging may appear surprising. Given that older adults are confronted with bodily deterioration, increasingly frequent health problems and memory failures, and losses in mobility and in the social worlds, how do people maintain high levels of affective well-being? One possible explanation, which has recently received much attention, is an increasing motivation to regulate emotional states and increasing competence to do so (Blanchard-Fields, 2007; Carstensen, 2006). Subsequently, we review recent frontiers in the quest for understanding emotional processing and emotional regulation as determinants of positive affective change with age. We start by outlining theoretical predictions about emotional aging. We then review recent evidence on age-related differences in the processing and remembering of emotional stimuli and in emotional reactivity and regulation. We next focus on the cognitive requirements and costs of emotional regulation. Finally, we delineate fruitful new directions in research on emotional aging. Specifically, we propose more systematic efforts to link levels of emotional functioning with long-term outcomes, consideration of emotional goals, combining behavioral with neuroscience studies, and interventions to counteract the costs of an emotion–regulatory focus and improve emotional aging outcomes for those not showing positive affect trajectories.

How the hell can you read, comprehend and summarise all this crap in under 3 mins? This took me more than 6 mins to read through and I was so focused on timing I started writing down random things I didn't comprehend.

I don't know that I agree with this method.

Perhaps as a training exercise this method may be effective, but I personally didn't benefit that much - It only confused me.

Can you please explain how you would approach this? I simply can't understand how all that can be done in <3 mins. You must have the reading speed and comprehension of a god if you can go through all that in such a short time.

Para 1: Midwives involvement in chilbirth in british society in 18th century and the lack of evidence of nature of childbirth in Wales.
Para 2: Various articles that proves the involvement of midwives in child birth at Wales.

Summary/: Midwives involvement in british and welsh childbirth during the 18th century

gmatexam439 Read 3 passages yet, thank you so much such posts in the forum it helps many people like us to find valuable contain at one place.

Is it Young learners or young leaders?
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I found the second para very difficult to understand I was comfortable with the first one
There were too many terms I wasn't comfortable with

Exercise for 29 October 2018

My response is:
Para 1: Experiments on visual imagery after taking psilocybin
Para 2: Capturing the perceptions about engagement with objects/pictures around
Para3: question about non reconciliation between Subjective improvement and no objective improvement

May please comment

P1: The situation of Min industry in USA during the discovery of Gold in California.
P2: Significant impact of SM discovery. Yield of G (upward)
P3: Using old method for mining
P4: New Method replaced with Old method
P5: another method for mining

MP: the discovery of gold, its impact and the evolution of methods of mining
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My reading speed is not good. Yet tried to read and take mental notes within 4 minutes.

P1: Using non primate model for studying EP
Why?
P2: Another model(using rat and mice)
Not well suited. Why?

Mp: Using animals to study EP

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