bkw wrote:
I understand, and agree they are the closely related or the same. But this is what I have been thought. Honestly I think it would be better if one of the knewton instructors could explain this rather than someone who has 40-80%WRONG on RC.
I think I have seen KnewtonAdam hanging around here, so he would probably be better at answering what the exact difference is.
not sure to whom you're referring with the 40-80% statistic.
i would suspect that there's not really much of a difference, mostly because they use those two letters to make a clever acronym ("MAPS"). whenever acronyms are used for anything, their creators usually have to try harder to shoehorn the concepts into the proper letters -- in other words, in order to make the acronym work, you sometimes have to make distinctions/classifications that aren't necessarily fully justified.
I think I have seen a question about the tone of the author somewhere, cant recall whether it was in OG12.
However, I am sure they have them in the Knewton practice problems -- I mean if tone need to be figured out, then it must be asked for, right?
you didn't see it in og12, because og12 contains zero questions that ask explicitly for the tone of a passage.
knewton doesn't write the official gmat, so, at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter what is in their questions -- all that matters is what is in the official questions. (this isn't a knock against knewton; exactly the same thing can be said of our practice questions, too. we don't write the test any more than they do)
what's probably even more important is to note what has been
removed from the earlier (11th) edition of the official guide; since most of the questions are preserved from edition to edition, the removals presumably indicate whatever trends may be current in the official problems.
GMAC removed the only explicit tone question that was present in og11, so that's probably a leading indicator of what is going to happen on the actual test.
I do agree here, I rarely used/(use) those notes to be honest. It is or was more a method keep me doing something instead of just staring at the problem, I mean if you write , you might understand SOMETHING rather than idling, or just wasting time staring at the problem without understanding what you read (quick skim). Now, I have started to stop just writing for the sake of writing something and trying out more the approach to only go for main point, and whatever relates to the main point.
good.
I totally agree here.. but how do I best get proficient at these thing? By just cramming more RC problems?
well, no, not necessarily -- if what you're doing right now is wrong, then doing twice as much of it is just going to be ... well ... twice as wrong.
this is pretty much the case with any sort of bad habit that you might have, in doing anything: if you currently have a bad habit, then more practice is a BAD thing -- because it will solidify that bad habit!
:-S Or should I look for any specific book, video, or even wish it as a study hall topic?
i might do a future study hall on inference questions.
note that the study halls are piecemeal for a reason: the point is to give you useful information (and attract business to our company), while at the same time not giving away too many key components of our actual paid course for free. therefore, while i'm not opposed to treating this sort of thing in the study halls, the study-hall treatment is going to be partial, as usual.
Concerning your find the main point video. I really like it, and it seem to work quite good. But I assume it requires some practice to properly select all transitions and things that are of relevance, also to learn how to ignore or visually cover anything else than what is important for the main point. A word of warning might be that it can still be time consuming.
well, ya, it requires practice, sure.
but don't you ever, say, browse articles on the internet for general meaning, but ignore the finer details so that you can get through them more quickly? if so, then that sort of reading is remarkably similar to the sort of reading that you should be doing on the GMAT RC's.
For example, I practiced on this one: Verbal Review 2nd RC 61-63, I got confused here when I try to apply the "transition-ala-mainpoint" method, it is quite much text, and I couldn't even find much of transition signals. My notes become something similar to:
Recently _____ challenged
To find princip that explain _____
However those found in ______ do only well ___
Thus suggesting ____
(Please let me know if the transition words above could have been better. I did not even find anything transition related in the beginning of the passage... :-(
well, you probably ought to know that ignoring entire paragraphs is hazardous to your health. if you don't see anything that's legitimately a transition, then just try to notice what's generally going on in the "neighborhood" of that paragraph -- i.e., what kind of stuff is in there -- without going too much into the details.
so i'd do this:
P1
blah blah facts about mangrove forests
P2
The idea that ______ was first expressed by ______
(--> introducing a new hypothesis)
P3
Recently ______ has been challenged
(--> contrary view)
P4
To find a principle that explains _____, (people) have looked to _______
(searching for more hypotheses)
that led me to (d).
even from the fledgling notes that you took, it's still pretty clear to me that (d) is better than the other choices. which other choices did you feel were legitimate competitors?
It took me about four minutes to parse the text and jot these lines down.
whoa! that's a long time. if you do that sort of partial reading method, in which you are basically ignoring all details, then even a long passage shouldn't take too much longer than about 2 minutes -- unless you have trouble reading english on a quotidian basis. if you spent 4 minutes on just doing the "partial reading" of this passage, then you probably got too caught up in details.
if the latter is true (i.e., your entire experience of reading in english is choppy at best), then you are going to have to make sacrifices when it comes to RC anyway; in that case, you may want to quickly move to random guessing on main-idea questions, so that you have more time to spend on detail questions.
if the latter is not true -- i.e., if you can read english at a pretty brisk pace in normal situations -- then a good way to get better at detecting this sort of logical structure is to read
editorials or
opinion pieces. since those are arguments, they will have to have logical structures that are clearer than usual (as opposed to normal newspaper articles, which, by journalistic convention, are supposed to consist almost entirely of facts, and therefore aren't much use at developing your skill at detecting transitions and logical flows).
Although I was unsure, I managed to get Q61 correct. But beside the main question this method does not help (which of course is not the idea).
ya, that's the point.
the point is to get you through the passage REALLY QUICKLY, so that you will have substantially more time to root out the answers to the detail questions.
shouldn't take you more than 2 minutes (and probably less than that, since, remember, you aren't paying attention to details
at all when you use this method).
Maybe the "transition-ala-mainpoint" method is better suited for short passages that can easily be overviewed?
that was largely my intention. i didn't say so explicitly, because the method is also applicable to longer passages (like this one); however, as you've mentioned below, there is already a reliable structural approach to longer passages that greatly compresses the amount of information that you actually need to read.
I mean for long passage we still have the other approach of read the first paragraph and first sentence of each paragraph mhm....
