Tone is the feeling or emotion associated with a passage or a part of a passage. An author creates tone with the specific words he or she chooses to include. Adjectives and adverbs give authors a chance to express emotion because they are explicitly descriptive; much of an author’s tone is created in the way he or she describes things.
Sometimes an entire passage has a tone. Take this example:
In recent weeks, we’ve been examining how to analyze specific questions using the system described in the original How To Analyze A Practice Problem article. We’re continuing the series this week with a look at an Inference question from a Reading Comprehension passage.
There’s so much to do as you prep for the GMAT….review math formulas, remind yourself of grammar rules from way back when, take practice tests, learn this whole new world of data sufficiency…there are endless tips on how to improve your score, and most people find the need to spend 2-3 months or so preparing. In addition to the study-prep tips that are already top of mind, such as working through all of the practice problems in your test-prep books, there are other things that you can do during your preparation period that can indirectly help you improve your GMAT score, outside of your study time. One of these is to READ as much as possible between now and Test Day.
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.
If there’s one question type that makes most GMAT testers sigh or even curse, it’s Reading Comprehension. Most testers find the passages confusing or boring or some combination of both. The questions may be hard to follow, ask for information that is difficult to find in the passage, and/or present answer choices that are hard to understand and difficult to choose between. However, as RC is roughly 30% of the Verbal section, these questions simply cannot be disregarded. Typically, a GMAT tester will see 4 passages with 2-4 questions each. Passage subject matter ranges from social science/history to economics/business to science/technology. Question types range from information retrieval and specific inference to primary purpose and passage structure. RC appears roughly once during every set of 10 questions. Therefore, performing well on the first 3 passages, which will occur during questions 1-30, is essential to building and maintaining a great Verbal score.
If there’s one question type that makes most testers sigh or even curse, it’s Reading Comprehension. Most testers find the passages confusing or boring or some combination of both. However, as RC is roughly 30% of the Verbal section, these questions simply cannot be disregarded. Typically, a GMAT tester will see 4 passages with 2-4 questions each. Subject matter ranges from social science/history to economics/business to science/technology. Passages occur roughly once during every set of 10 questions. Therefore, performing well on the first 3 passages, which will occur during questions 1-30, is essential to building and maintaining a great Verbal score.
Success at Reading Comprehension depends on two limiting factors: (1) The rate at which the information you’re reading enters your brain and (2) what your brain is able to do with it. The latter, being able to act on information, is a composite skill that is acquired through years of learning.
Fortunately for test-takers, the first factor — your speed of reading — can be seriously increased with a few simple adjustments in technique. You can learn how to read faster as long as you’re willing to put in the practice. Here’s how to do it.
Many answer choices on the GMAT are written to be tempting. Some answers will be blatantly wrong, but most will only be slightly wrong.
That’s why you have to pay close attention to passage wording in Reading Comp and Critical Reasoning. Both sections make you read huge chunks of text closely but quickly, so when you’re scanning the questions for a passage the words start to run together. Here are some tips for keeping things straight.
Let’s first note the two reasons why we read in everyday life:
You may have already known that the GMAT does not use particularly “interesting” topics. Most content of a passage deals with topics such as a biological process, a historical event, or a technological innovation. It would be silly to simply hope that your passages on the GMAT will be about specific topics that interest you.
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:
GMAT test-takers often ask about reading materials that help prepare them for the Reading Comp section of the test. While we always remind them that the reading comprehension section, at heart, is about reference and not real reading, we also acknowledge that for those who have been working too hard to pick up a book or magazine, it can be enormously helpful to re-catch the reading bug.
Here is a list of Knewton’s suggestions for real-world reading comprehension practice.
There are several ways in which the LSAT and the GMAT are alike: both have reading comprehension sections with fairly similar question types, focusing on the author’s tone and approach, the passage’s main idea, and the use of details to support and flesh out the author’s points. Each of these tests also has a critical reasoning section in which the savvy test-taker uses similar approaches to many of the assigned tasks: identifying assumptions, strengthening and weakening arguments, and drawing inferences are examples. However, it’s important to remember that there are also some distinct differences between the two; this can especially have an impact on how you study, since many students use LSAT questions to bridge the gaps in released GMAT materials. The LSAC, or Law School Admissions Council, releases the majority of its questions, giving LSAT students access to a far larger official question bank than that made available by the GMAC. Here are a couple of thoughts to consider:
As we’ve seen, flaw questions on the GMAT follow predictable patterns: the flaw always in some way addresses either how the evidence is being interpreted to lead to the conclusion, or how the evidence was obtained. Let’s take a look at a few specific examples of common GMAT flaws.
This week, we have the second half of an article written by guest-author 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.
These articles contain Chris’s advice (slightly edited for length) on general strategies for the major verbal question types. Last week we covered the first two strategies, which pertained to Sentence Correction. This week, we cover three additional strategies for Reading Comprehension and Critical Reasoning. Take it away, Chris!
The flipside of the “strengthen” question coin on the GMAT is the “weaken” question. The same set of evidence and conclusion can easily be used for either question type, so it’s always a good idea to start by reading the question itself first, to determine the task before you go to the argument. After that, your approach is almost identical to the way that you would approach a strengthen question. Take this question, for example:
