Hovkial wrote:
You are already doing well with your ability to correctly solve the
OG verbal questions within a certain period of time. You should still review the explanations, which you seem to be doing.
The official explanations may appear dry but they are correct in terms of officially accepted grammatical practice. I disagree with some others that these explanations are not good. They are the best available materials that come directly from official sources. Spending time is necessary at first. After you obtain some amount of practice, you will start to feel more comfortable and will be able to speed up the process. Learning may be slow in the beginning, but most students will see improvements in both accuracy and speed.
Hello,
Hovkial. I will admit to feeling as though I misplaced "often" in my earlier statement that "the explanations in the book are terrible, often steeped in technical language..." I should have qualified my statement with examples. I was not merely referring to SC explanations, but to those for RC and CR as well. (I simply cited a broad SC example.) I do not have to look too deep in the
OG to come up with pertinent examples. The very first
RC question in the Diagnostic Test, based on
this passage, indeed the same question as the first one listed on this site, offers the following analysis for a question asking, "Which of the following best describes the purpose of the sentence in lines 10-15?":
(A) To show that economic signaling theory fails to explain a finding
Official Analysis: The sentence does not explain a failure of the economic signaling theory.
Wow, that is deep. This is akin to saying the wrong answer is wrong because it is not right. When I scroll through the community dialogue, however, I find useful comments that provide some insight into
why the answer is sub-optimal.
Looking ahead at
a CR question about sleds, we see a similar non-analysis in response to the question, "Which of the following, if true in Verland, most seriously undermines the force of the evidence cited?"
(A) A few children still use traditional wooden sleds.
Official Analysis: The limited use of some wooden sleds does not weaken the argument.
Compare this terse analysis with the one provided by
GMATNinja:
Quote:
Again, the evidence cited is "that the number of children injured while sledding was much higher last winter than it was ten years ago." This evidence seems to suggest that plastic sleds are more dangerous than wooden sleds. Even if a few children still use traditional wooden sleds, if injuries have increased since plastic sleds became popular, this still seems to suggest that plastic sleds are more dangerous.
The evidence cited does not require that ALL children use plastic sleds, so (A) can be eliminated.
Finally, what are we to make of the following
SC analysis, to
this question? The sentence:
New data from United States Forest Service ecologists show that for every dollar spent on controlled small-scale burning, forest thinning, and the training of fire-management personnel, it saves seven dollars that would not be spent on having to extinguish big fires.Official Analysis (for (A)):
It has no referent;
not be spent is awkward;
on having to extinguish is wordy.
Granted, knowing what a referent is can be useful for application to other questions, but "awkward" and "wordy"? How are those objective measures by which to assess other questions and answer choices?
The
OG is full of such poor-quality explanations. Yes, as you indicated, explanations to SC answers
are correct in terms of officially accepted grammatical practice; however, that does not make them inherently useful to someone studying for the test. If better explanations are provided on this site—and those by
GMATNinja,
daagh,
VeritasKarishma,
DmitryFarber, and
AjiteshArun, among a few, fit the bill—then I say to make use of those explanations, potentially at the expense of the ones that prove less useful for the task at hand.
On one point we seem to have reached a consensus: reviewing explanations will allow someone to improve his or her performance down the road. I am fine if you disagree with my take on the quality of official explanations. I just thought I would better qualify my opinion from earlier. The goal is always to help GMAT™ aspirants, plain and simple.
With respect,
Andrew
close
03 Sep 2020, 06:20
