Start Here For RC: GMAT Ninja's Reading Comprehension Collection

Start Here for RC:

GMAT Ninja's Reading Comprehension 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 reading comprehension. With the mountains and mountains of stuff on this website, where should you start with RC?

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 basic starting points:

• Articles and videos with guidance on how to improve your RC performance
• Resources for improving your underlying reading skills
• Where to find mountains of practice RC questions

Part 2 features a motherlode of RC explanations, organized by passage type. We're not huge fans of hyper-focusing on individual RC passage types, but if you want to see some examples of how to think through certain RC passages, we'll point you to some of our favorites in each of these categories:

• Business
• Humanities
• Science
• Social Science

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 RC Advice & Resources

Reading Comprehension: The Basics

Articles & Forum Posts

• Ultimate RC Guide for Beginners. This guide isn't ONLY for students who are new to the GMAT -- if you've been hitting your head against a wall on RC for a while now, the process outlined in this guide might help you get back on the right track.
• What to do about timing on GMAT Verbal

RC Video Series (Summer 2020)

• Dump the gimmicks and read the (bleeping) thing: a simple, no-BS approach to GMAT RC | Video
• GMAT RC topics don't matter, part 1: conquering your fear of science passages | Video
• GMAT RC topics don't matter, part 2: conquering your fear of literature & cultural passages | Video
• Going from good (V40?) to GREAT (V45?) on GMAT RC | Video

Other Videos

• The 7 Most Common GMAT CR & RC Mistakes
• How Cutting Corners Kills Your GMAT Score (on Quant and Verbal)
• All GMAT Ninja LIVE YouTube verbal videos

How to Become Better at Reading in General for the GMAT

This isn't what anybody wants to hear, but most GMAT RC 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 RC -- and especially if you're struggling at least as much on CR -- 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:

• GMAT Ninja’s Guide to Leisure Reading, Part 1: How Nonfiction Can Help Your GMAT Score
• GMAT Ninja’s Guide to Leisure Reading, Part 2: The Benefits of Reading Fiction to Improve Your GMAT Score

Where to get more RC questions

There's absolutely no substitute for official GMAT RC questions, and the GMAT Official Guide and Official Verbal Guide should already be your best friends. But if you need more than that, here are some good places to look:

• Why you should use LSAT questions as GMAT RC practice
• Carcass‘s incredible master directory to official verbal questions

Part 2: GMAT RC Explanations by Passage Type

How to use these complete RC explanations

First of all: memorizing our explanations -- or anybody’s explanations -- is a total waste of your time, especially for verbal questions.

Why?

Nobody likes to hear this, but we'll say it again anyway: the vast majority of reading comprehension errors happen when the test-taker fails to catch the EXACT meaning of the passage, question stem, or answer choices. A good, full explanation will rephrase the text in nice, clear language. And if we do our jobs well as explanation-writers, you’ll easily understand why the OA is correct.

But after reading our RC explanations, will you be in a better position to understand the EXACT meaning of a totally different RC question or passage? Probably not. You might pick up some good tips on how to structure your thinking, or how to overcome your fears of particular RC subject areas. But studying our explanations won’t make you a better, more precise reader -- and it definitely won’t do much to help you figure out where YOU went wrong in terms of your reading process.

Instead, here’s how we recommend practicing reading comprehension -- or anything else on the GMAT:

• After you’ve completed a set of practice RC questions, don’t review your mistakes (or read an explanation) right away. Instead, wait a few days, and then attempt the question again, doing your best to forget that you’ve ever seen it before.
• If you easily answer the question correctly when you redo it, pay close attention to what you did differently the second time -- and work on making whatever went right part of your process EVERY time you tackle an RC passage.
• If you miss a question a second time, then reading a full explanation might help a bit. But keep in mind that your goal is to figure out where YOU went wrong, and how YOUR personal process can be optimized. So use our explanations as a tool for self-discovery -- not as a strict, step-by-step recipe.

Also, if you aren’t confident in your overall approach to reading comprehension, you might want to start with our beginner’s guide to RC, or our mountain of YouTube videos. We also discuss self-study strategies in depth in this video.

OK, rant over. Now, here’s the motherlode:

Humanities RC Passages

• In 1938, at the government-convened National Health
• The professionalization of the study of history in the second half
• Historians sometimes forget that history is continually being made
• When Jamaican-born social activist Marcus Garvey came to the United
• Linda Kerber argued in the mid-1980’s that after the American

Science RC Passages

• During the past 40 years, the star FG Sagittae has changed color
• Dendrochronology, the study of tree-ring records to glean information
• Determining whether a given population of animals constitutes]
• Conodonts, the spiky phosphatic remains (bones and teeth composed
• Carotenoids, a family of natural pigments, form an important part
• In the Sonoran Desert of northwestern Mexico and
• In 1994, a team of scientists led by David McKay began studying
• Resin is a plant secretion that hardens when exposed to air
• There is no consensus among researchers regarding what qualifies
• When asteroids collide, some collisions cause an asteroid to spin faster
• Scientists have been puzzled by the seeming disparity
• Most attempts by physicists to send particles faster than the speed
• While the most abundant and dominant species within a particular

Business RC Passages

• Seventeenth Century philosopher John Locke stated
• Many people believe that because wages are lower in developing countries
• Because the framers of the United States Constitution
• Whereas United States economic productivity grew at an annual rate
• Conventional wisdom has it that large deficits in the United States budget
• Firms traditionally claim that they downsize
• The system of patent-granting, which confers temporary monopolies
• According to P. F. Drucker, the management philosophy known as Total
• In an effort to explain why business acquisitions often fail
• In their study of whether offering a guarantee of service
• The fact that superior service can generate a competitive advantage
• In the wealth of nations (1776), Scottish economist Adam Smith asserted

Social Science RC Passages

• Historical documents have revealed that among the Timucua
• Historians have identified two dominant currents in the Russian women's
• In 1675, Louis XIV established the Parisian seamstresses’ guild
• The Black Death, a severe epidemic that ravaged fourteenth century
• It is an odd but indisputable fact that the seventeenth-century English
• Traditional social science models of class groups in the United States
• In the 1930’s and 1940’s, African American industrial workers in
• Federal efforts to aid minority businesses began in the 1960's
• In current historiography, the picture of a consistent, unequivocal decline

Want similar resource guides for CR & SC?

• Start here for CR
• Start here for SC

_________________

I'm sitting my GMAT on Saturday and have struggled for a while to bump my verbal score up consistently past the low-30s range. Between my second to last and most recent practice exam I watched every single one of the Ninja YouTube videos. Damn, these are awesome! I scored a V38 on my recent practice exam, with two silly errors on CR questions. Most importantly, I got every question right of the 14 RC questions I was asked.

I'm doing some very light SC work for the next day or so and really hoping to break the V40 mark on Saturday.

Thanks for all you do, your videos and solution posts have kept me sane during this very long process!

Thank you so much for the kind words, Cathal93! I'm honored that we could be a part of your journey, though I worry for your mental health if you had to stare at my face for... 30 hours? 40 hours? That can't be good for you.

Good luck with your retake on Saturday! Enjoy the test-day journey, and let us know how it goes -- we're rooting for you.
_________________

Hi, I am Indian preparing for GMAT. I have seen Gmat ninja mention LSAT as a good source of practicing for CR and RC and LSAT prep books offer some of the difficult material with lots questions for practice. But LSAT books are not easily available in India and take over a month to ship. Is there any other alternative?

#GMATNinja #LSATforGMAT #charlesbibilos

I like the hashtags!

You can get several free official LSAT tests on the LSAC LawHub website, and at the same place you can purchase 70 LSAT tests for $99.

One note: Skip the "Analytical Reasoning" sections, which are not GMAT-related at all. On the Reading Comprehension and Logical Reasoning (aka Critical Reasoning) sections, don't worry about the 35-minute time limit! That's blazing fast, and MUCH faster than you'll need to be for GMAT verbal.

I hope that helps!
_________________

Hahaha, thanks for hashtags 🙂. This definitely helps and will give them a shot. Thanks for the guidance!

Posted from my mobile device

They're all official RC passages of some kind. The vast majority are from the OG and verbal guide, but there might be an occasional LSAT passage in there, and maybe a few from the official mba.com practice tests. But they're all high-quality passages from official sources.

Enjoy!
_________________

I Got inspired by this story, posted by GMATNinja.

https://gmatninja.wordpress.com/2012/10 ... questions/

I am a non-native speaker and I have been going at LSAT from the beginning of the preparation.
I have finished a total of 1087 LSAT Questions (have a subscription of LawHub online for this).
I also finished close to 500+ LSAT LR questions.

Across all practice average accuracy is around 75% for LSAT, now a days for untimed I am at 90% accuracy as I can read the pattern easily and know the trap choices.

But now I am struggling with timing, it almost takes an hour and 30 minutes for me to finish 27 LSAT questions ... how do I bring this down to 1 hour or less? I need some serious advice ...

I have put close to 1000 hours already (have everything logged in my timesheet, pure study time, no phones, no web browsing etc.) since September 2020 and still pushing hard as I am closing the gap now, so need some direction from you guys, please help!

Thanks.

Whoa, that's some serious dedication, IN2MBB2PE! I'm not surprised -- you're obviously a familiar, hard-working member of the community here. But it's still one heck of a thing when you hit the 1000-hour mark. It's truly impressive.

Depending on your score goal, your accuracy is already approaching the right range. As a VERY broad rule of thumb, if you're able to get at least 80% of LSAT CR and RC questions correct, you're on track for a 40V (or better, if your accuracy is higher than 80% on the LSAT sets).

The bad news is that I also like to see you get through those LSAT sets (roughly 25 questions each) in under 60 minutes. But I think you knew that already.

The really hard thing is that there are a ton of different reasons why your times might be so high, and I can't even begin to guess which of these is the issue for you. A few thoughts, in case they spark something for you:

• Failing to do each set with test-like intensity. (Seems unlikely for you, but it's a common problem.)
• Obsessing over every little word of the passages, when you don't really need to. You'll see plenty of proselytizing on this in our RC videos.
• Other inefficiencies in your process for tackling passages/questions -- which could mean all sorts of things. We try like crazy to teach efficient processes in all of our verbal videos, but it's impossible for us to know which things are or aren't working right for you.
• Fundamentally slow reading... and that would be a bad thing that can't really be fixed easily in the short run.
• Fatigue, burnout, low blood sugar, or some other "external" cause. (Rarely the entire problem, but often part of it. You're a slower reader when you haven't slept well, right?)

I wish I could tell you which of these things is happening, but I can't possibly know that, unfortunately. Odds are pretty good that it's a combination of several of these factors, though I'm skeptical of the first factor in your case, just because you seem to be so thoughtful about practicing systematically. But I could be wrong about that.

Most test-takers with verbal speed problems automatically assume that the problem is that that they're slow readers, and that isn't necessarily the case. It's often part of the problem, but it's rarely the whole story.

In your case, here's my (admittedly somewhat wild) guess: you're a pretty accurate reader, but since you're a non-native speaker, I wonder if you're focusing a bit TOO hard on the details. As a native speaker, if I struggle with a word or a sentence or a paragraph (and that happens to me WAY more often than you might expect!), I'll generally try to work around the part that's difficult for me. Can I still understand what's going on? On RC, do I still understand WHY that paragraph is there, and how it fits into the author's argument? Cool -- then I'll probably move on. But non-native speakers are often conditioned to hyper-focus in those situations, and that's not always productive or efficient.

Again, I might be way off here. And it's very possible that your reading speed isn't great, too. But I would recommend taking a good, hard look at your process, both when you read passages and when you start eliminating answer choices: are you trying to squeeze every little detail out of the passage, at the expense of the big picture? Are you obsessing over answer choices when you might be better served by just picking something and moving on? Those are likely to be the easiest things to fix -- but still not easy.

But again: I'm still guessing. Think of it as food for thought -- unless you're working with a tutor, you'll ultimately need to do a whole lot of self-reflection to find process inefficiencies or issues with your energy levels. And that's admittedly a very challenging undertaking.

I hope that helps a bit, and keep us posted on your progress!
_________________

Thanks GMATNinja, thanks for taking the time from your busy schedule to reply me, I truly appreciate that. I think you hit couple things that might be the issue for me for Verbal and I realized that today when I took my first GMAC Official PT1 and got crushed with 610 (Q43, V31, IR 3.0). I focus too much into the details of every single word and ponder to understand before moving on ..... that's the main culprit of my timing problem. Other problem for me is I have practiced way too much untimed and it put my brain at Ease, so I recommend based on my experience, Practice first timed, then practice untimed the same question that you got wrong but always practice timed first time. I think practicing untimed from the get go is not a good advice to also deal with test anxieties that comes with timed tests.

As I said, my main purpose of taking the PT1 was to understand where I am lacking and to draw some actions prior to taking PT2 (Which I do not want to waste unless I can get to where I need to, which is at least a 720-760 ... yes ... I know it's a dream for now ... but I want to shoot for Mars to end up at the ISS.

Attached is a detailed analytics that I put together based on my PT1 performance (Despite my basic chart knowledge, I still got IR 3.0 :p), I can gauge the following -

1. I made a mistake not using Ear plugs (I am going to use that for every test going forward), in the middle of the verbal test my neighbor started his lawn more while I was trying to focus on CR but no excuse as I did most of my practice on LSAT RC during my 1 hour one-way train ride to work

2. Crammed/reviewed formulas from 7AM-11AM and then going for the PT1 (I should have started at first thing in the morning after light warm up, my brain was foggy by the middle part of the Verbal

3. As can be seen from the Verbal performance, I did fairly decent until the last quarter of the test, this is when the time pressure got me SIX questions wrong in a ROW, causing a total of 8/9 last questions wrong and I believe this brought down my overall score down because I did get lot of really hard SC right in the middle part of the test, these difficulties are based on GMAT Club difficulties and percent correct by the users.

4. For Quant, I got caught up with 4-5 problems where I spent 4+ minutes each and ended up getting all of them wrong. For many quant I had no clue how to approach the problem. I did TTP 3X all examples (Easy/Medium/Hard), have a 80%+ on all Medium questions across the board. I think the problem was I did not solve enough OG or Hard TTP problems. So every time, I saw a hard question, I had to kill more time or bounce and ultimately paid the price.

5. Focus was a huge issue during the second half of the Verbal, I felt I was lost, I was reading stuff but I was not understanding what I was reading (maybe a second language speaker problem, I do not know), I was literally being a news presenter reciting what I see without having any clue of what is going on, this is when I got the 9/10 questions wrong. I did meditate a week leading into the PT. I even went out for a run before the exam, cold shower, had the right food and the meditate just before I started the test but then could not keep my composure during game time.

Enough of debugging, here's what I am thinking in terms of actions for next 3-4 weeks before I try PT2:

Quant (Q43 -> Q49-Q50):

1. Being an Engineering grad, I think I can improve here. I cannot aim anything below Q49, there's just no way. I will finish all TTP Hard problems timed. The ones I got wrong I will do untimed and them again on a separate review note book. Then I will start doing GMAT Club Quant CATs on Medium and Hard levels (3-4 sets at least prior to taking PT2 and after finishing all TTP Hard problems) MartyTargetTestPrep JeffTargetTestPrep ScottTargetTestPrep - I am thinking this should put an end to the Quant stuff for me, I did not have a whole lot of problem managing time with Quant but the accuracy was just not there for me. Also I found there was way too many questions from Function, which is an area not much covered in TTP lessons, might need to beef up the theories in that area. But as shown in the analysis - Function & Sequences, Geometry, Statistics, Inequalities are the sections I got most number of errors, so I will go all out with those and the rest, that is basically the plan with Quant.

Verbal (V31 -> V40): GMATNinja boss please suggest if I need to modify anything further AndrewN old friend please jump in as necessary, you are an angel ....

Reading Comp (64% Accuracy)

1. I need to get back to reading - Everyday read 1 article from Economist and 1 from National Geography, read for PURPOSE. Once the GMAT started and the clock hit, I forgot to read for purpose. I was just plain reading ... that hurt my accuracy ... I got 5 RC Questions WRONG!
2. I am going to one LSAT RC Passage each day at least and solve one full set under 1 hour mark during the weekend
3. Read for PURPOSE, I do not know what happened. As per my process, I always read 1 paragraph and reread it to myself and did it after each paragraph and once I finish reading the whole thing. Once the test started this was out the door, so I need to get back to my process and force myself to READ FOR PURPOSE during practice.

Critical Reasoning - (50% Accuracy)

1. I had 75-80% across ALL OG and LSAT for LR but I did not practice this much leading up to the test as I initially prepared a lot on CR as this was my weakest area back in 2020 when I started preparing and then solved a total of 1000 questions, 600+ of those are LSAT as I ran out of OG CR questions and made error log for every single one of them! So I will get back on swing practicing sets of 10 under 20 minutes from LSAT every other day (No point solving the whole set given GMAT only tests 10 per verbal section, it will save me some time as well) - This is my plan for CR

2. My average time with CR was 1:50. I think this was not enough. Although I need to practice to be under 2 min per CR. I need to calm myself down for accuracy on CR. So I need to somehow spent an extra 10-20 secs per CR Question.

Sentence Correction - (62% Accuracy - 1:45/QN)

1. I think I spent way too much time per Question of SC, I need to bring this to 1:30 and practice at 1:20 under timed condition.
2. I read both the Nirvana SC Book by EducationAisle and TTP theories - TWICE and I practiced all Main OG Questions (200+), plus watched GMATNinja videos (all of them, currently doing the 24-hour marathon). I also made notes while doing the videos and basically went into gmatclub for each of the questions that Charles explained, I had a 67% accuracy on all of the 75 problems solved by Charles on the 13 videos so far. So now I think I plan to redo all the OG 200 Main guide questions, especially the one I got wrong, try to do them under 1 minute. Once that's done I will focus on starting with the Verbal guide, maybe ten questions at a time and thoroughly reviewing them. I think I am not always understanding the meaning based approach, tried a lot of different things and kind of confused how to approach. My approach was to go for those definite errors of 7 categories (Pronoun, Modifier, S-V, Parallelism, Comparison, Tense etc.) > then read horizontally first and then look for splits and at the end go with meaning. It yielded good results at the first 3/4 of the tests, but screwed me up with timing. The process was right but I could not execute properly under timed condition. I am left with OG Verbal questions and advanced questions, should I use these 150 now or just redo the ones I got wrong and disect everything out of them first before I approach the remaining 150 questions, what should I do on SC? This is my biggest worry right now ...

Some more actionable items -
1. Continue meditation (maybe go from 10 minutes to 20 minutes at a time to improve deep focus)
2. Long walks to calm myself down
3. Tutor for Verbal > I might just need some extra help from professionals to push the verbal barrier. It's just like going to a doctor, you can wait and suffer or seek professional help. I have already sacrificed 1000 hours that I could have spent with my loved ones, A damn MBA takes 2 years to finish and here I am spending over 2 years doing GMAT ....

For tutoring options, I am considering GMATNinja & GmatTutorKnight, depending on who is available at short notice!

Also big shout out to Target Test Guys for responding to me on the chat, I appreciate you guys very much, let's get to work!