As discussed previously in this space, the authors of the GMAT have two primary goals when they write any GMAT question – they want you to have the potential to get the question wrong, and they also want to give you the opportunity to waste precious time as you arrive at your answer (so that you have the potential to get future questions wrong).  Cleverly, they have designed a style of Critical Reasoning question that is suited to serve both ends – the “Mimic the Reasoning” question.

Read More

Last week, we covered the basic components of an Argument and how to identify them (Critical Reasoning for Beginners, Part 1: The Components of an Argument). Now let’s put the theory into practice and look at a simple Sample Argument.

Read More

Perhaps the most frustrating of the three Verbal question types, Critical Reasoning (or Argument) questions present a difficult challenge for most testers. While they’re somewhat less involved than Reading Comprehension questions, they require a significant measure of language processing and reasoning. Often testers find the text of CR questions to be convoluted and confusing. Sometimes, the questions themselves can be phrased in ways that make the question tasks difficult to identify. However, as CR is roughly 30% of the Verbal section, these questions simply cannot be disregarded. Performing well on CR during questions 1-30 is essential to achieving one’s target Verbal score.

Read More

We live in a quantitative society, which is a major reason why your GMAT score is so crucial– we like to support our decisions using numbers.  When someone tells you, however, that they “ran the numbers”, is that explanation adequate for acting on their research?  Every day we are showered by numbers that seem to support decisive action on our part – “save up to $100/month”; “95% fat free” – but those statistics, correct as they may be, might not actually mean that their purveyor’s conclusion – “buy this product” – is the best one for us.  To save up to $100/month, we will likely need to spend much more than that on nonessential purchases; that 95% fat free statistic is a clever way of saying that the product is 5% fat, and the potential exists that your body will convert much of the other 95% to fat pretty quickly, anyway.

Read More

A few weeks ago, we covered the topic of Math in Critical Reasoning Questions (click on the link to read the article), brought to us by Chris Ryan, Manhattan GMAT’s Director of Instructor and Product Development (not to mention one of the people I admire most in the GMAT world). We’ve got another great installment from him this week, this time on the concept of causation in Critical Reasoning questions.

Read More

On the GMAT verbal section, all questions consist of one right answer choice, and four wrong answer choices.  Test takers tend to focus on how to get to the right answer (obviously).  However, to really sharpen your verbal skills, I also encourage students to spend some time during their preparation focusing on wrong answer choices as well.  Just as there is great care from the test creators to make a choice unequivocally correct, there is just as much effort to make the other four answer choices unequivocally wrong. Being able to spot wrong answer choices is especially helpful when you’ve made an elimination of wrong answer choices, and you’re narrowing down to the correct answer from two or three remaining choices.  Here, I’ll discuss two common wrong answer types in GMAT Verbal (which show up in both Reading Comprehension and Critical Reasoning): choices that we classify as Extreme, and Out of Scope.

Read More

We have a guest-author this week: Chris Ryan, Manhattan GMAT’s intrepid Director of Instructor and Product Development. If you’ve used any Manhattan GMAT material in your prep, Chris is the man to thank: he may have written it, proofed it, managed it – somehow, he has touched everything that Manhattan GMAT publishes. This week, Chris is giving us some pointers on how to deal with math (math?) in Critical Reasoning questions. (There’s math on Critical Reasoning?!?) Without further ado, here’s Chris:

Read More

Last year, we discussed how to study individual practice problems in the article How to Analyze a Practice Problem. Someone recently asked me to demonstrate this process via an actual Critical Reasoning problem, so that’s what we’re going to do this week: discuss how to analyze and master a particular GMATPrep® CR problem.

First, set your timer for 2 minutes and try this GMATPrep® problem:

Read More

The writers of the GMAT are masters of human psychology — as you work through practice questions, how often do you return to your errors and ask yourself “how could I have made that mistake again?” Well, the reason is that you’re just predisposed to doing so — we all are — and the writers of the test know it.

One way that the writers commonly tap in to our inefficiencies as thinkers is that it’s well known that human beings are suckers for things that end in “-st.” We want to be the best, make the most, drive the fastest, pay the least, and come in first. Don’t tell your client that your proposal is a good option; say to her that it’s the best, or the safest, and you’ll be much more likely (the most?) to win that contract. We think in terms of superlatives so often that we tend to see them when they don’t even exist. Consider the following question (which appears courtesy of the Graduate Management Admissions Council):

Read More

This week, we’re going to analyze a challenging GMATPrep® Critical Reasoning question.

First, set your timer for 2 minutes and try the problem!

Read More

From previous posts, I’ve discussed the need to understand certain grammar concepts on the GMAT in order to do well.  As you continue to study for the GMAT, make sure you focus on these specific grammar areas.  Additionally, on any given question, the GMAT is often testing several of these concepts.  Thus, as we teach in our Kaplan classroom course, make sure you have a great strategy to keep all the moving parts organized.  The following conceptual topics appear often on the test:

Read More

Last time, in Comparing Comparisons Part I, we talked about three methods that the GMAT uses to make comparison wrong answer choices confusing and tempting.

1. Wrong answer choices may include one or two incorrect entities.
2. Wrong answer choices may compare the correct entities on the wrong criterion.
3. Wrong answer choices may compare the correct entities on the correct criterion, but make the comparison backwards.

Read More

The GMAT is in love with comparisons. In fact, one might say that the GMAT test-makers are more likely to be in love with comparisons than they are to be in love with any comparable sentence structure. See what I did there? The GMAT puts comparisons in all three verbal question types, and it does it as often as possible, which is why having a deep understanding of how comparisons work on the GMAT is a key test skill.

Why does the GMAT love comparisons so much? Let us count the ways:

Read More

The following book review was written by Dana Jinaru.  Dana is currently a finance student in Europe and also serves as a moderator for Beat The GMAT.  On May 13, 2009 she scored a 770 on the GMAT.

Here is Dana’s analysis of PowerScore’s GMAT Critical Reasoning Bible.

Read More

The GMAT has a limited bag of tricks up its sleeve to disguise incorrect answer choices. Think of the test-makers as politicians caught in a lie; they can exaggerate, change the subject, twist the truth further, or draw dubious inferences to throw you off their scent. In the end, though, any politician will tell you that the most efficient way to get away with a lie is to simply confuse your accuser into submission. This is one of the GMAT’s greatest tricks, and one of its most common techniques with which to accomplish it is to use negation and reversals in unexpected and mystifying ways.

Negations are words that reverse the meaning of a sentence. They include adverbs and adjectives, such as not, cannot, unlike, or without, as well as verbs that negate their subjects, such as neglect, deny, reverse, refuse, or counteract. Negations can make parsing them into a nightmare, especially during the GMAT, when reading quickly is a key skill. Dealing with negations and reversals effectively is doubly important for non-native English speakers.

Read More