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gmat strategy help

by krishhxa » Mon Feb 08, 2016 10:40 am
Hi,

I have been facing issues in certain type of quant questions which is being a major obstacle in acheiving my dream score.

Kindly guide.

1. Certain type of DS questions which have inequality signs. such as is x>0 or any question with inequality in the answer choices as well as in the proving.

I fail to understand what values should i choose in the limited 2 minutes to figure out whether the situation is true/false.

2.In PS Certain type of percentage questions which consist of either tax or some kind of increase or decrease and the answer choices are given in variable terms such as p+r/t+q

I freak out in such questions because each sentence of the problem has something happening. It becomes hard for me to comprehend the problem and solve it in such variables. Kindly guide any easy way to go about such complex questions.

3. The mixing questions.

can hardly solve them.

4. General inequality questions.

Can't figure out the numbers i should choose because there mite be a case where the response comes out false. Many cases can be made.

Kindly guide me fore the above mentioned problems.

further just wanted to enquire out of the sc questions that come up in gmat. About how many can be solved correctly with plain logic. without getting into the technical aspects?

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by DavidG@VeritasPrep » Mon Feb 08, 2016 11:12 am
krishhxa wrote:Hi,

I have been facing issues in certain type of quant questions which is being a major obstacle in acheiving my dream score.

Kindly guide.

1. Certain type of DS questions which have inequality signs. such as is x>0 or any question with inequality in the answer choices as well as in the proving.

I fail to understand what values should i choose in the limited 2 minutes to figure out whether the situation is true/false.

2.In PS Certain type of percentage questions which consist of either tax or some kind of increase or decrease and the answer choices are given in variable terms such as p+r/t+q

I freak out in such questions because each sentence of the problem has something happening. It becomes hard for me to comprehend the problem and solve it in such variables. Kindly guide any easy way to go about such complex questions.

3. The mixing questions.

can hardly solve them.

4. General inequality questions.

Can't figure out the numbers i should choose because there mite be a case where the response comes out false. Many cases can be made.

Kindly guide me fore the above mentioned problems.

further just wanted to enquire out of the sc questions that come up in gmat. About how many can be solved correctly with plain logic. without getting into the technical aspects?
There's a lot to chew on here. I think it might be a better idea to post individual examples of actual questions that you struggled with, and then we can talk those through step-by-step. (So start one thread with a particular inequality question, one thread with a particular mixture question, etc.)
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by krishhxa » Mon Feb 08, 2016 11:17 am
Thanx for the promt respnse.I will surely do that.But can you kindly guide me how to solve inequality questions that appear in ds.I get confused on how to solve the same.

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by DavidG@VeritasPrep » Mon Feb 08, 2016 12:13 pm
krishhxa wrote:Thanx for the promt respnse.I will surely do that.But can you kindly guide me how to solve inequality questions that appear in ds.I get confused on how to solve the same.
It'll depend on the question. If the question were, say, "Is x > 3?" you may end up picking numbers.

If the question were "Is x + y > x - y?" you'd simplify to get "Is y > -y?" which is really just "Is y > 0 ?"

This is all to say that in some cases, you'll pick numbers. In other cases, you'll do algebra. It's possible that on another question you'll do a combination of algebra and number-picking. So it's hard to give a piece of prescriptive advice, such as "Always do x," when the best approach will depend on the context of a given question
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by MartyMurray » Mon Feb 08, 2016 6:21 pm
krishhxa wrote:further just wanted to enquire out of the sc questions that come up in gmat. About how many can be solved correctly with plain logic. without getting into the technical aspects?
Good question.

I am not sure of the exact answer to that question, but in a way most of them can be solved correctly via the use of "plain logic". In fact, the last time I took the test, I was happy to see that all of the SC questions I saw were rather hackable.

I can also say that I have seen someone who does not have a perfect command of English score 47 on the verbal section of the GMAT.

Basically, GMAT sentence correction IS ABOUT logic, and increasingly the questions reflect that situation.

Maybe on a given test a test taker will see three or four SC questions such that in some way getting them right requires or almost requires some specific knowledge of grammatical or idiomatic construction. Then again, is a subject matching a verb "technical"? I guess maybe what you are asking is "How many SC questions are such that getting them right requires the use of advanced knowledge of grammar and other sentence construction rules and conventions?" The answer to that question is "Not very many."

Having said that, there are key things that one needs to notice in order to get SC questions right. So some preparation for SC definitely helps. For instance, parallelism is logical, but if you haven't thought much about parallelism then you might not notice that a construction is not parallel, and therefore not logical.

Also, this discussion is a little bit tautological in that, if one doesn't understand certain things related to sentence construction, one may have difficulty sorting out what is logical and what is not.

Taking a practice test and seeing how you do may be the best way to answer your question. I personally was able to get most SC questions right without doing much preparation and without having ever thought about many of the rules and conventions that people talk about. I used practice test results to see where there were some knowledge gaps that I could fill in order to get more SC questions right, and then I did some focused work to fill those gaps.

Even that method won't give you a perfect answer though as I think that the questions in GMAT Prep are less logic based than the more recently created ones that show up on the actual test.

Another thing that comes to mind is that from what I have seen, most of the time people miss SC questions more because they don't notice something than because they don't know about certain rules.
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