issue of meaning

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resilient: Legendary Member; Posts: 789; Joined: Sun May 06, 2007 1:25 amFollowed by: 6 members; Location: Southern California, USA; Thanked: 15 times

by resilient » Wed Jan 23, 2008 9:54 am

I notice that I am losing points to questions that test the understanding of meaning. I usually assign the wrong answer choice because I look too much into the grammatical differences i.e. parallelism, subjec- verb agreement etc. WHat can I do?

Appetite for 700 and I scraped my plate!

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Source: Beat The GMAT — Sentence Correction | Wed Jan 23, 2008 9:54 am

Stuart@KaplanGMAT: GMAT Instructor; Posts: 3225; Joined: Tue Jan 08, 2008 2:40 pmFollowed by: 614 members; Location: Toronto; Thanked: 1710 times; GMAT Score:800

by Stuart@KaplanGMAT » Wed Jan 23, 2008 11:28 am

There are 3 criteria for a correct answer to an SC question on the GMAT.

In order of priority, they are:

(1) Grammar
(2) Meaning
(3) Style

So, the first thing we always look for is grammatical correctness. A choice that makes a grammatical error will never be correct, no matter how good it sounds.

The next item on our hit list is meaning. The only time that it's acceptable to change the meaning of the original sentence is if the original doesn't actually make sense. So, if we have more than 1 answer that's gramatically correct, we check to see if any of them change the meaning of the sentence (e.g. change an adjective to an adverb).

Finally we worry about style. If there's more than one answer that's both gramatically correct and that adheres to the meaning of the original sentence, then we look for the answer that's stylistically superior.

Many test takers make the mistake of worrying about style before meaning, which may be the issue that you're having.

Stuart Kovinsky | Kaplan GMAT Faculty | Toronto

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