GMAT Critical Reasoning: 8 Essential Tips

by Target Test Prep, Feb 11, 2022

Critical Reasoning (CR) questions are at the heart of what is tested on the GMAT, because CR questions directly challenge your thinking skills across a wide range of situations that require critical analysis, logical reasoning, and attention to detail.

In fact, some students find that Critical Reasoning GMAT questions are the trickiest questions they encounter in the Verbal section of the GMAT. To master GMAT CR, you must be able to employ smart, efficient strategies for analyzing arguments and eliminating answer choices that are carefully and cleverly worded to trick, trap, and confuse you.

In this article, I’ll give you 8 tips that can help you truly master GMAT Critical Reasoning, discuss why shortcuts and gimmicks won’t help you make serious gains in your Verbal score when it comes to GMAT CR, and lay out an effective pacing strategy for tackling CR questions. But first, let’s take a look at some Critical Reasoning basics and review the different CR question types.

GMAT Critical Reasoning: What to Expect

Of the 36 Verbal questions you see on the GMAT, between 9 and 13 will be Critical Reasoning questions.

GMAT Critical Reasoning questions are designed to test your skill in making, analyzing, and evaluating arguments and plans.

Each Critical Reasoning question begins with a written stimulus, usually a short passage of about 100 words or fewer, which is followed by a question and 5 answer choices.

The question will always ask you to determine which of the 5 answer choices is logically related to the stimulus in a particular way (we’ll look at what those ways are shortly).

Like GMAT Reading Comprehension passages, Critical Reasoning passages can be related to subjects such as economics, science, music theory, politics, and psychology, to name a few, but you don’t need to have any specialized knowledge of these subjects in order to answer CR questions.

Any information that you might need that is not contained within the CR passage will be information that is considered “common knowledge” for anyone with a high school (or even middle school) education.

For example, in evaluating the logic of CR answer choices in order to determine which is correct, you might need to know that profit equals the money taken in from selling something minus the cost of selling that thing, but you would never be required to know the relationship between mortgage interest rates and bond yields.

The former is common knowledge, while the latter is specialized knowledge in economics.

Aside from common sense and a basic level of education, all of the information you’ll need to answer a GMAT CR question will be within the written stimulus.

CR questions are not testing your level of knowledge about a particular topic; they’re testing your ability to logically evaluate information that is given to you.

The “author” of a GMAT CR passage may be some unidentified person writing about a plan or a proposal, a town’s mayor arguing for the implementation of a new law, or a concerned citizen who concludes that there are too many cars using the freeway near her house.

While the authors of these arguments vary from question to question, one commonality that they all share is that they assume that they are correct, whatever their argument may be. In other words, they assume that their arguments are sound and logical. Your job will be to parse their arguments — what conclusion has the author reached?

What evidence does she give to support the conclusion?

What assumptions does she make? — and to analyze, in some way, statements (answer choices) related to those arguments.

So, you won’t need to know anything about local politics or city planning to analyze the arguments of the town mayor or the concerned citizen, but you will need attention to detail, skill in the use of logic, careful, clear thinking, and an ability to sidestep mental traps and cognitive biases.

Now that we know the basic structure of CR questions and what they test, let’s take a look at the different types of CR questions you can encounter on the GMAT.

GMAT CR Question Types

There are 11 major GMAT Critical Reasoning question types:

• Find the Assumption: These questions ask you to select the answer choice that presents an assumption upon which the author’s argument depends.
• Weaken the Argument: These questions ask you to select the answer choice that presents a fact that would weaken or hurt the author’s argument.
• Strengthen the Argument: These questions ask you to select the answer choice that presents a fact that would support or help the author’s argument.
• Resolve a Paradox: These questions ask you to select the answer choice that presents a fact that would resolve a situation that appears to be (but is not actually) paradoxical.
• Cause and Effect: In general, these questions ask you to weaken, strengthen, or evaluate an argument that is based on cause-and-effect reasoning.
• Inference: These questions ask you to select the answer choice that presents an unwritten conclusion that must be true based on only the information presented in the passage.
• Find the Conclusion: These questions ask you to select the answer choice that presents a conclusion that is best supported by the passage.
• Evaluate the Argument: These questions ask you to select the answer choice that would best help you determine whether the given argument is well-constructed or poorly constructed.
• Logical Flaw: These questions ask you to select the answer choice that presents a flaw in the argument’s reasoning.
• Complete the Passage: These questions, which are hybrids with other question types, ask you to select the answer choice that best completes an uncompleted passage.
• Method of Reasoning and Bold Face: These questions ask you to determine the way that a passage is logically organized or structured.

Of those 11 question types, the first 3 — Assumption, Weaken, and Strengthen — are the most common, but you never know what mix of question types you’ll see on any given GMAT, so it’s important to be prepared for all of them. Luckily, all of the various GMAT CR question types call upon the same key skills: your ability to analyze an argument, your ability to understand what the question is asking you to find, and your ability to find that thing (and not something that the question isn’t asking you to find).

So, let’s take a look at how to best refine and implement the skills you’ll need to conquer GMAT Critical Reasoning.

Tip #1: Practice Identifying the Parts of an Argument.

Every argument is composed of 3 key components: a premise or premises, which are the facts that form the foundation of the argument; one or more assumptions on which the argument is based; and a conclusion, which is supported by the premise.

There also may be some background information given in a CR passage, to add context to the argument (ex. The Turkey Lodge has been a free meeting space for community groups in the Town of Gobble for more than 40 years). It can be helpful to think of an argument as a math problem:

(any background info) + Premise + Assumption = Conclusion

To effectively analyze a passage presented in a GMAT CR question, it’s essential that you are able to identify which sentences provide evidence or background and which sentence presents the conclusion.

Remember, CR passages are quite brief — generally a handful of sentences — so identifying the function of the different sentences shouldn’t take long, once you know what to look for. With that in mind, let’s delve a little deeper into the 3 components of an argument.

Premise (Evidence): A premise is a fact that supports the argument’s conclusion and is used to build the argument. Such facts typically provide reasons for believing that the conclusion is correct or justification for the conclusion.

In other words, premises are the evidence provided by authors of Critical Reasoning arguments. This evidence may come in the form of statistics, observations, or results of scientific studies, to give a few examples.

The important thing to remember about premises given in a GMAT CR passage is that they are always statements of fact. You must consider any premise in a CR passage true.

Assumption: Unlike premises, assumptions are not stated in the passage. An assumption is an unwritten piece of information that has to be true in order for the logic of a given argument to work.

In other words, if an argument‘s assumptions are found to be incorrect, the argument will fall apart. Thus, a vital part of any argument is its assumptions, because without them, the argument’s conclusion could not be true. Think of assumptions as the glue that connects the evidence to the conclusion.

You don’t see the glue — the information isn’t written on the page — but without it, the evidence and the conclusion don’t form a seamless whole.

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