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Thanks
MartyTargetTestPrep, I have read your posts about practicing Verbal. However, I haven’t found a resource which would let me practice, say - only Tenses, for SC. Also, even though sometimes I know the concept, I fail to recognise it on the exam question. Any tips?
You can use a third-party question bank or the GMAT Club Advanced Search to find categorized verbal questions.
Here are some tips for handling SC questions that may help.
SC is a test of your skill in noticing things. So, when you're practicing SC, you're working on developing skill in
noticing issues.
articulating exactly what those issues are.
- When you start working on an SC question, read the entire original version of the sentence including any non-underlined portions. You don't necessarily have to read the non-underlined portions every time you read one of the choices that follows, but you need to keep them in mind as you go through the choices.
- To a large degree, what you are doing as you go through an SC question is using your working memory and seeking to notice issues.
For instance, if you read a noun toward the beginning of the sentence, you have that noun in your memory so that when you later come to a verb, you notice whether the noun and the verb agree.
Similarly, if a sentence begins with a modifier, when you come to what follows that modifier, you have the modifier in mind and notice whether it logically modifies what follows it.
- When you read the first version, seek to notice any issues in it. You may not notice any on the first pass, or you may notice some areas that seem suspicious but you're not sure about.
If you see clear issues on your first time through the original version, eliminate it and note where the issues lie because other choices are likely to have issues in similar areas.
If you're not sure about whether the original version is correct, keep it and continue through the choices.
- On your first pass through the choices, you are mainly looking for easy outs as indicated by issues such as
the subject and verb of a clause don't agree
a pronoun does not have a logical referent or does not agree with what it refers to
an opening modifier does not logically modify what follows it
there's no independent clause
- Don't expect to find the correct answer on the first pass through the choices. If you do, great, but probably, you'll be left with two or three choices that you have to consider more carefully.
Also, often it takes a little while for the question to come into focus. On the first pass, you may not see any choices to eliminate. That's OK. If you don't see any clear issues on the first pass, you go back through the choices and look for more blatant issues. You're sure to see some in a few choices as you keep looking, and once you get rid of a few choices, you'll have a lot less to think about, and you can focus on the remaining choices.
Overall, keep in mind that SC is a test of what you notice, and as you practice, you'll notice more and more and become better able to articulate what's going on with what you notice.