What to do with RC's that dumbfounded you...

TkNeo

I have across RC's that would be for a very high score and hence very difficult only to leave me completely mystified. ! Now its very importance to get the central meaning of an RC since one is at a risk of incorrectly answering all of the related questions...

How should one proceed in that case? I took a test today that had 4 RC's. 4th one was very hard. I read it twice since my reading speed is decent.. but i had no clue what happened. I guessed on the first question, which asked the central meaning blah blah. I thought the next 2 questions would be concentrated on exact text and hence easier to answer only to be proved wrong. All were inference based questions on central idea of the passage. As expected, I got all wrong Sad

beatthegmat · Posted: Sat Jan 26, 2008 3:33 pm Post subject:

RC is really tough to advise people on because certain strategies work well for some people, but poorly for others.

If you are in a situation where you have an really tough passage that is confusing you, my advice is to try employing multiple reading strategies to try extracting the meaning. For example, you can:

Read through the passage entirely - see what you get
Read the topic sentence of each paragraph - see if you can get a gist of the story
Write down an outline of key points as you read
etc.

Take this advice with a grain of salt because unfortunately you have only a limited amount of time for each question--you DO NOT want to let any passage throw you off pace from completing the section!

Conclusion: understand a few techniques for RC, and be prepared to use them for the tough ones.

I hope this helps!