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The Test-Makers’ Top 10 Wrong-Answer Ploys
1. The response distorts the information in the passage. It might understate, overstate, or twist the passage’s information or the author’s point in presenting that information.
2. The response uses information from the passage, but does not answer the question. The information cited from the passage isn’t useful to respond to the question at hand.
3. The response relies on speculation or an unsupported inference. It calls for some measure of speculation in that the statement is not readily inferable from the information given.
4. The response is contrary to what the passage says. It contradicts the passage’s information or runs contrary to what the passage infers.
5. The response gets something in the passage backwards. It reverses the logic of an idea in the passage, confuses cause with effect, or otherwise turns information in the passage around.
6. The response confuses one opinion or position with another. It incorrectly represents the viewpoint of one person (or group) as that of another.
7. The response is too narrow or specific. It focuses on particular information in the passage that is too specific or narrowly focused in terms of the question posed.
8. The response is too broad (general). It embraces information or ideas that are too general or widely focused in terms of the question posed.
9. The response relies on information that the passage does not mention. It brings in information not found anywhere in the passage.
10. The response is utter nonsense. It makes almost no logical sense in the context of the question; it’s essentially gibberish.
Heartstrings:
Beware of answer-choices that contain extreme emotions. Remember the passages are taken from academic journals. In the rarefied air of academic circles, strong emotions are considered inappropriate and sophomoric. The writers want to display opinions that are considered and reasonable, not spontaneous and off-the-wall. So if an author’s tone is negative, it may be disapproving—not snide. Or if her tone is positive, it may be approving—not ecstatic.
Furthermore, the answers must be indisputable. If the answers were subjective, then the writers of the GMAT would be deluged with mails from angry test takers, complaining that their test-scores are unfair. To avoid such a difficult position, the writers of the GMAT never allow the correct answer to be either controversial or questionable.
Keywords: Keywords tell readers what is about to happen next. Some signal words tell readers about the sequence; others tell about a similarity or difference. Students often overlook these clues. Make sure you think aloud for students to model how these words can be used.
Sequence Words: after, afterward, ahead of, all through, as before, beforehand, during, earlier than, first, second, third ... finally, later, now, prior to, sooner than, subsequently, then, throughout, while Restatement or Synonym Words
Also, as well as, by the same token, correspondingly, equally, equally so, especially, for example, in that, in the same way, just as, likewise, similarly, such as these, too Contrast or Antonym Words Alternatively, although, apart from, but, by contrast, contrary to that, conversely, despite, even though, however, in contrast, in spite of this, nevertheless, nonetheless, notwithstanding, on the other hand, regardless, some ... but others, still, then again, yet
Four basic tasks:
The passage below demonstrates four basic capacities that factor into the reading of a new text. After a complete reading, try employing the following four skills:
• Identify the main idea
• Locate a specific detail
• Consider the organization of the paragraphs
• Make at least one inference
Many people argue that the rise of cable news has degraded national political discourse. They blame the starkness of the left-right political divide on the sensationalist presentation style employed by 24-hour news networks in their effort to make journalism more entertaining and palatable. As evidence of the trend, opponents point to the dramatic increase in the number of news commentators—partisan newscasters who argue vociferously for one party or another. Such programs, critics say, contribute to the hostile, uninformed political climate that can be held responsible for the lack of bipartisanship in government. Ultimately, however, cable news has been vindicated by its opponents. Demographics show that its loudest detractors come from demographics that have been historically apolitical, namely, young people, married women, and lower-middle class workers. Since the launch of CNN in 1980, cable news viewership rates have
risen proportionally with greater political participation and activism by groups that were previously apolitical. Studies of TV ratings trends and polling data show that college students and housewives are the largest consumers of cable news. In other words, detractors of cable news blame the very source of their political awakening for the frustrating political climate of which it has made them aware. Main Idea: Though people blame cable news for the toxic political climate, the growth of its viewership has led to greater political participation by the very classes that denounce it.
A Detail: CNN launched in 1980.
Passage Structure: The first paragraph explains that many people attribute a particular cause to a supposed problem; this attribution is undermined in the second paragraph.
An Inference: Before 1980, housewives and college students were less politically active than they are today.
Our RC blasphemies that WORK on the test day:
• RC is the most crucial among all test areas: Our experience tells us that, on average, each RC question weighs almost twice as much as each CR question and almost thrice as much as each SC question.
• You cannot cross the 700 mark if your RC is bad: Our experience tells us that students really good at Quant, SC, and CR, but average at RC tend to stop short of 700. We have seen countless 670-690 scorers, who, only for want of a superlative performance on RC, could just not breast the coveted 700+ Club tape.
• RC under normal concentration and relaxed pace can be very different from RC under trying exam conditions: fourth hour on the test, race against the clock, the mind refusing to understanding any word at all, and the imperative to finish the test ensure that, more often than not, the victim (and the biggest culprit) is RC.
• When you don’t do well on RC, you lose 3-4 questions in a row: Consecutive errors are penalized so severely on the test that, at any given point on the test, 3-4 consecutive errors can bring your ‘current’ score by almost 100 points. Bad RC ensures that you have at least 3-4 such chunks of score-drops. OUCH!!
• Normal pace: Every conceivable resource possible on GMAT RC will ask you to speed-read, skip, skim, etc. Trust us: nothing could be more gimmicky. Don’t speed-read GMAT RCs. It may be curtains! Your natural speed must improve after practicing 300+ passages.
• Focus on understanding: Every conceivable resource possible on GMAT RC will ask you to understand only the main idea and skip the details. We have even seen such advice: read only the first line of each para etc.
Trust us: nothing works on the test day. There is no substitute for a reasonable understanding. These resources / books / instructors / test-prep companies take passages (that lend themselves to such gimmicks) and show the application of the gimmicks that work on a ‘particular’ passage.
• Read the full passage first: Some books / test-prep companies will be asked to read the questions first. Nothing could be a bigger disservice to oneself.
• Don’t skip: You can’t afford to skip information. Your understanding of the passage will be distorted otherwise.
• Don’t skim: Skimming is a self-contradictory term. Without reading everything, how can one decide the grain from the chaff? Again, understand that there is no substitute for understanding.
• Don’t reread: Develop a habit of reading the passage only once and understanding it well. Most of us tend to reread the first few lines. The signal to our subconscious brain is: “let me not understand it fully. Anyway I have to come back and reread.” It may be tough to get rid of this habit but this is extremely crucial to train your brain not to reread.
• Don’t write anything at all: The mother of all wrong pieces of advice on the GMAT is: write / make a skeletal / make a structure / annotate etc. UGH!! This is the WORST advice one can give a student.
o Why should you not write?
You are so pressed for time on the test day that you never use your notes. Why learn and rely upon something that will not work on the test day?
Invariably our experience says that students never use what they write. Why waste precious time?
Once your brain gets a subconscious signal that you can write, the understanding vanishes.
You are just taking notes passively. RC is about active application, not passive note-taking.
• Must go back while solving the questions: A lot of times, students rely upon their memory and miss out on the intentional distortion used so effectively by the test-makers (psychometricians). These people are masters of making the wrong answers that seem more attractive than the right answers. The best way to avoid this is to go back to the passage to justify each word in the answer choices. Extreme WORD JUSTIFICATION is the name of the game.
• Don’t do more general reading; solve more RC exercises: The ubiquitous advice that people get when they do badly on RC is: READ, READ, and READ.
WRONG! If this were to be the case, you would be answering the questions right in the first place. You have been reading every day for at least the last 10 years, at least.
Solve more and more RC passages ... RIGHT!
• Don’t bother about vocabulary: A lot of people bother about understanding each word in the passage to an obsessional level. Indeed, a good vocabulary can help you ... but there is no point in developing superior vocabulary NOW. The efforts can be completely disproportionate compared to the returns. So the best bet is to guess the meaning of a new word by the context.
• Plan four-hour nonstop sittings only with RC to make sure you concentrate well on the test. If you genuinely want the 740+ score, you can’t skip this piece of advice.
• Don’t solve anything else except what has officially appeared on Standardized American Tests such as the GMAT, the GRE, or the LSAT. There are at least 500 genuine such passages available for you to practice with.
• Beware of the central opinion / theme / main idea / tone etc. while reading the passage.
• Ideally for a passage with 3 questions, you must not take more than 5 minutes and for a passage with 4 questions, you must not take more than 6.5 minutes.
Part 3 coming soon......
Source SG
IF you liked the post please give kudos
1. The response distorts the information in the passage. It might understate, overstate, or twist the passage’s information or the author’s point in presenting that information.
2. The response uses information from the passage, but does not answer the question. The information cited from the passage isn’t useful to respond to the question at hand.
3. The response relies on speculation or an unsupported inference. It calls for some measure of speculation in that the statement is not readily inferable from the information given.
4. The response is contrary to what the passage says. It contradicts the passage’s information or runs contrary to what the passage infers.
5. The response gets something in the passage backwards. It reverses the logic of an idea in the passage, confuses cause with effect, or otherwise turns information in the passage around.
6. The response confuses one opinion or position with another. It incorrectly represents the viewpoint of one person (or group) as that of another.
7. The response is too narrow or specific. It focuses on particular information in the passage that is too specific or narrowly focused in terms of the question posed.
8. The response is too broad (general). It embraces information or ideas that are too general or widely focused in terms of the question posed.
9. The response relies on information that the passage does not mention. It brings in information not found anywhere in the passage.
10. The response is utter nonsense. It makes almost no logical sense in the context of the question; it’s essentially gibberish.
Heartstrings:
Beware of answer-choices that contain extreme emotions. Remember the passages are taken from academic journals. In the rarefied air of academic circles, strong emotions are considered inappropriate and sophomoric. The writers want to display opinions that are considered and reasonable, not spontaneous and off-the-wall. So if an author’s tone is negative, it may be disapproving—not snide. Or if her tone is positive, it may be approving—not ecstatic.
Furthermore, the answers must be indisputable. If the answers were subjective, then the writers of the GMAT would be deluged with mails from angry test takers, complaining that their test-scores are unfair. To avoid such a difficult position, the writers of the GMAT never allow the correct answer to be either controversial or questionable.
Keywords: Keywords tell readers what is about to happen next. Some signal words tell readers about the sequence; others tell about a similarity or difference. Students often overlook these clues. Make sure you think aloud for students to model how these words can be used.
Sequence Words: after, afterward, ahead of, all through, as before, beforehand, during, earlier than, first, second, third ... finally, later, now, prior to, sooner than, subsequently, then, throughout, while Restatement or Synonym Words
Also, as well as, by the same token, correspondingly, equally, equally so, especially, for example, in that, in the same way, just as, likewise, similarly, such as these, too Contrast or Antonym Words Alternatively, although, apart from, but, by contrast, contrary to that, conversely, despite, even though, however, in contrast, in spite of this, nevertheless, nonetheless, notwithstanding, on the other hand, regardless, some ... but others, still, then again, yet
Four basic tasks:
The passage below demonstrates four basic capacities that factor into the reading of a new text. After a complete reading, try employing the following four skills:
• Identify the main idea
• Locate a specific detail
• Consider the organization of the paragraphs
• Make at least one inference
Many people argue that the rise of cable news has degraded national political discourse. They blame the starkness of the left-right political divide on the sensationalist presentation style employed by 24-hour news networks in their effort to make journalism more entertaining and palatable. As evidence of the trend, opponents point to the dramatic increase in the number of news commentators—partisan newscasters who argue vociferously for one party or another. Such programs, critics say, contribute to the hostile, uninformed political climate that can be held responsible for the lack of bipartisanship in government. Ultimately, however, cable news has been vindicated by its opponents. Demographics show that its loudest detractors come from demographics that have been historically apolitical, namely, young people, married women, and lower-middle class workers. Since the launch of CNN in 1980, cable news viewership rates have
risen proportionally with greater political participation and activism by groups that were previously apolitical. Studies of TV ratings trends and polling data show that college students and housewives are the largest consumers of cable news. In other words, detractors of cable news blame the very source of their political awakening for the frustrating political climate of which it has made them aware. Main Idea: Though people blame cable news for the toxic political climate, the growth of its viewership has led to greater political participation by the very classes that denounce it.
A Detail: CNN launched in 1980.
Passage Structure: The first paragraph explains that many people attribute a particular cause to a supposed problem; this attribution is undermined in the second paragraph.
An Inference: Before 1980, housewives and college students were less politically active than they are today.
Our RC blasphemies that WORK on the test day:
• RC is the most crucial among all test areas: Our experience tells us that, on average, each RC question weighs almost twice as much as each CR question and almost thrice as much as each SC question.
• You cannot cross the 700 mark if your RC is bad: Our experience tells us that students really good at Quant, SC, and CR, but average at RC tend to stop short of 700. We have seen countless 670-690 scorers, who, only for want of a superlative performance on RC, could just not breast the coveted 700+ Club tape.
• RC under normal concentration and relaxed pace can be very different from RC under trying exam conditions: fourth hour on the test, race against the clock, the mind refusing to understanding any word at all, and the imperative to finish the test ensure that, more often than not, the victim (and the biggest culprit) is RC.
• When you don’t do well on RC, you lose 3-4 questions in a row: Consecutive errors are penalized so severely on the test that, at any given point on the test, 3-4 consecutive errors can bring your ‘current’ score by almost 100 points. Bad RC ensures that you have at least 3-4 such chunks of score-drops. OUCH!!
• Normal pace: Every conceivable resource possible on GMAT RC will ask you to speed-read, skip, skim, etc. Trust us: nothing could be more gimmicky. Don’t speed-read GMAT RCs. It may be curtains! Your natural speed must improve after practicing 300+ passages.
• Focus on understanding: Every conceivable resource possible on GMAT RC will ask you to understand only the main idea and skip the details. We have even seen such advice: read only the first line of each para etc.
Trust us: nothing works on the test day. There is no substitute for a reasonable understanding. These resources / books / instructors / test-prep companies take passages (that lend themselves to such gimmicks) and show the application of the gimmicks that work on a ‘particular’ passage.
• Read the full passage first: Some books / test-prep companies will be asked to read the questions first. Nothing could be a bigger disservice to oneself.
• Don’t skip: You can’t afford to skip information. Your understanding of the passage will be distorted otherwise.
• Don’t skim: Skimming is a self-contradictory term. Without reading everything, how can one decide the grain from the chaff? Again, understand that there is no substitute for understanding.
• Don’t reread: Develop a habit of reading the passage only once and understanding it well. Most of us tend to reread the first few lines. The signal to our subconscious brain is: “let me not understand it fully. Anyway I have to come back and reread.” It may be tough to get rid of this habit but this is extremely crucial to train your brain not to reread.
• Don’t write anything at all: The mother of all wrong pieces of advice on the GMAT is: write / make a skeletal / make a structure / annotate etc. UGH!! This is the WORST advice one can give a student.
o Why should you not write?
You are so pressed for time on the test day that you never use your notes. Why learn and rely upon something that will not work on the test day?
Invariably our experience says that students never use what they write. Why waste precious time?
Once your brain gets a subconscious signal that you can write, the understanding vanishes.
You are just taking notes passively. RC is about active application, not passive note-taking.
• Must go back while solving the questions: A lot of times, students rely upon their memory and miss out on the intentional distortion used so effectively by the test-makers (psychometricians). These people are masters of making the wrong answers that seem more attractive than the right answers. The best way to avoid this is to go back to the passage to justify each word in the answer choices. Extreme WORD JUSTIFICATION is the name of the game.
• Don’t do more general reading; solve more RC exercises: The ubiquitous advice that people get when they do badly on RC is: READ, READ, and READ.
WRONG! If this were to be the case, you would be answering the questions right in the first place. You have been reading every day for at least the last 10 years, at least.
Solve more and more RC passages ... RIGHT!
• Don’t bother about vocabulary: A lot of people bother about understanding each word in the passage to an obsessional level. Indeed, a good vocabulary can help you ... but there is no point in developing superior vocabulary NOW. The efforts can be completely disproportionate compared to the returns. So the best bet is to guess the meaning of a new word by the context.
• Plan four-hour nonstop sittings only with RC to make sure you concentrate well on the test. If you genuinely want the 740+ score, you can’t skip this piece of advice.
• Don’t solve anything else except what has officially appeared on Standardized American Tests such as the GMAT, the GRE, or the LSAT. There are at least 500 genuine such passages available for you to practice with.
• Beware of the central opinion / theme / main idea / tone etc. while reading the passage.
• Ideally for a passage with 3 questions, you must not take more than 5 minutes and for a passage with 4 questions, you must not take more than 6.5 minutes.
Part 3 coming soon......
Source SG
IF you liked the post please give kudos
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30 Jun 2021, 06:51
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Thanks to another GMAT Club member, I have just discovered this valuable topic, yet it had no discussion for over a year. I am now bumping it up - doing my job. I think you may find it valuable (esp those replies with Kudos).
Want to see all other topics I dig out? Follow me (click follow button on profile). You will receive a summary of all topics I bump in your profile area as well as via email.
Archived Topic
Hi there,
This topic has been closed and archived due to inactivity or violation of community quality standards. No more replies are possible here.
Where to now? Join ongoing discussions on thousands of quality questions in our Verbal Questions Forum
Still interested in this question? Check out the "Best Topics" block above for a better discussion on this exact question, as well as several more related questions.
Thank you for understanding, and happy exploring!
