Critical Reasoning

forgot the footnote-

**i can only think of two exceptions:

1/
a religious authority
(e.g., if a Christian says Jesus said X, or if a Muslim says Muhammad taught that X, then (s)he is probably going to agree with 'X');

2/
a beloved mentor/parent/etc
(e.g., My father always said... --> this would normally be followed by something the speaker learned from his/her father)

of course, neither of these things will ever appear in a GMAT CR passage, so, there you go.

andy2 wrote:Hi Ron,
Thank you sooo much for the clarification.

you're welcome.

by the way, you may have noticed that i haven't posted here regularly in some time-i've been too busy on our own (MPrep) forum. if you don't hear from me here (and the source is allowed on our forum) you may want to try your luck over there.

I think I missed "it has been suggested.." part

the best fix for this ^^ is to translate EVERY critical reasoning problem into conversational language.

there wil be at least three HUGE benefits (detailed in following posts).

BENEFIT #1 of translating CR into 'conversation':
you'll ALWAYS catch important transitions-even if they are 'tiny little words'.

this is the issue in your posts here. in an actual conversation, there is NO WAY you would miss 'Some people think...', and there is also NO WAY you would fail to understand the significance of those words.

(think about my 'fruit' example.)

BENEFIT #2 of translating CR into 'conversation':
you'll be able to anticipate where the passage is going.

consider:

When freelance writers are offered full-time staff positions, very few of them accept.
Some people try to explain this by...

if this is a conversation, you can predict ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING that's going to follow this.
the speaker will...
...say how most people explain this fact,
...reject that explanation,
...offer his/her own explanation,
...offer some sort of evidence/support/reasoning.

right?

ok.

now, turn to CR problem #116 in OG 13th/2015 edition ('Scientists...')
"¢Â read up to the word 'because'.
"¢Â stop reading.
"¢ if you imagine a conversation, you can predict EXACTLY how the rest of the argument will proceed. (you won't know the exact specifics, but you'll know the exact FORM the argument will take-it's the same as the one above.)
"¢ note that, when you reach the word 'because', you are only about 15 percent of the way through the passage... and that's good enough to let you predict THE ENTIRE REMAINING EIGHTY-FIVE PERCENT.

our 'conversational brains' are pretty amazing, hmm. (in fact, we take this amazing power for granted-so much that, if someone COULDN'T tell where we were going before we went there, we'd probably judge him/her as 'slow', and/or we'd think something was wrong with our communication.)
don't let this power go to waste on CR!