Start Here for CR:
GMAT Ninja's Critical Reasoning Resource Collection
So you're on the world's biggest and best GMAT website, and you're probably trying to figure out how to get better at critical reasoning. With the mountains and mountains of stuff on this website, where should you start with CR?
Well, how about here? This is our attempt to curate the literally millions(!) of words we've jammed into posts, articles,
full explanations, and
videos in our years as the GMAT Club verbal experts.
Part 1 of this post includes just the most basic starting points:
- General advice for improving your CR performance
- Where to find practice questions and exams
- Where to find a large pile of full CR explanations
- Resources for improving your underlying reading skills
Part 2 features CR resources by question type, including articles, videos, and complete explanations of a select group of our favorite CR questions. We're not huge fans of hyper-focusing on individual CR question types -- see part 2 below for a rant on that issue -- but if you want to see some examples of how to think through certain CR questions, we'll point you to some of our favorite examples for each of these types:
- Assumptions
- Strengthen & Weaken
- Complete the Argument & Fill-in-the-Blank
- Resolve the Paradox
- Boldface Questions
- Evaluate the Argument
- EXCEPT Questions
- Miscellaneous
Enjoy, and if there's anything you think we're missing, feel free to add a comment in the thread below.
Part 1: General GMAT CR Advice & Resources
Critical Reasoning: The Basics
Articles & Forum PostsVideosCR Questions & Practice Exam Resources
ArticlesExcessive Quantities of Full CR Explanations, Organized by Question Source
How to Become Better at Reading in General for the GMAT
This isn't what anybody wants to hear, but most GMAT CR errors are caused by an inability to catch the EXACT meaning of the passage, question stem, or answer choices -- not from any logical errors, or failure to study any particular question type. So if you're struggling consistently on CR -- and especially if you're struggling at least as much on RC -- then you might want to spend some time improving your overall reading skills.
Here are two articles that can help you get you started with improving your reading ability:
Part 2: GMAT CR Resources by Question Type
Apologies if you already read this above, but just in case you didn't: most GMAT CR errors are caused by an inability to catch the EXACT meaning of the passage, question stem, or answer choices -- not from any logical errors, or a failure to study any particular question type.
When we tutor our GMAT students, we never give long lectures about the logic behind assumption questions, or about ways to diagram paradox questions. Once our students have mastered a basic process for approaching CR questions (described in our
beginner's guide to CR), we rarely see imbalanced results based on question types -- and when we do, it's usually caused by a relatively basic misunderstanding that can be remedied quickly and easily.
That's a long-winded way of saying that we don't recommend obsessively categorizing GMAT CR questions, and we don't even recommend focusing your studying around particular question types. But if you notice that you repeatedly miss certain types of questions, here are some resources that might get you back on track.
Assumption Questions
VideosNegation TechniqueHonestly, we're not fans of the negation technique. Sure, it's logically sound, but
only if you actually negate the right thing. Figuring out the "perfect" negation is often more trouble than it's worth.
This post and
this post discuss the limitations of applying this technique in the context of
this question.
And if you'd like to see how we approach assumption questions without using the negation technique...
Full Written ExplanationsStrengthen/Weaken Questions
VideosFull Written ExplanationsComplete the Argument & Fill-in-the-Blank
VideosFull Written ExplanationsResolve the Paradox
Full Written ExplanationsBoldface Questions
VideosFull Written ExplanationsEvaluate the Argument
Video ExamplesExample QuestionsEXCEPT Questions
There's nothing particularly special or different about "except questions." This might sound silly, but the main thing to bear in mind when tackling these questions is to be completely clear about why you're crossing out an answer choice when working through the process of elimination. Otherwise, you'll risk getting twisted around, and crossing out the correct answer by accident. Sadly, that happens to test-takers all the (bleeping) time.
Full Written ExplanationsMiscellaneous
Somewhere in the neighborhood of 20% of GMAT CR questions don't fit neatly into categories above, and here are full explanations of some of our favorite CR oddballs:
Full Written Explanations
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11 Mar 2021, 20:57
