Sentence Correction

Please give an insight in the strategy to be employed if the entire sentence is underlined in sentence correction question of GMAT.

Thanks in advance

ronnie1985 wrote:Please give an insight in the strategy to be employed if the entire sentence is underlined in sentence correction question of GMAT.

Thanks in advance

IMO: There is no special strategy for entirely underlined questions.

Use methods which are used for every SC Question.

Good question, Ronnie - and GMATKiss is on the right track in that sound SC strategy will work whether the underlined portion is short or long. But there are a few things that you can use to lighten the load a little when it looks like you're responsible for huge chunks of text:

-Scan the answer choices for obvious differences, and in particular those that you know are commonly tested. If you see, for example, two iterations of "are" and three of "is", your job just became clearer - you need to find the subjects of those verbs and check for singular/plural. If you see any obvious differences, leverage those to get rid of a few answer choices and further narrow in on your next decision point.

-I almost always look for modifiers first. If the whole thing is underlined but the first 5-10 words are a description separated by a comma, there's a good chance that I can knock out a few answer choices before ever having read the whole sentence if I can determine that they're incorrect modifiers. It's not always the case, but often when the whole thing is underlined there's a modifier in play.

-I also try to test connectors - when the whole sentence is underlined the GMAT has that "needle in a haystack" advantage over you in which it makes it that much harder for you to recognize connectors like "and", "but", "or", etc. If the whole thing is underlined and it's a fairly long sentence, there's a good chance that two items are going to be connected, and I like to see if I can find that connector to see whether it's connected properly.

-The other tricky thing about whole-sentence-underlined problems is that there's just so much to read. Here I like to lean on what we call the "Slash-and-Burn Technique", which teaches you to ignore (correct) modifiers, adjectives, and adverbs, and to break off independent clauses. For example, a sentence like:


Researchers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, hosted by the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, have recently discovered that molecules of water, comprised of hydrogen and oxygen atoms, makes items in which it comes in contact with wet.


Has a ton of text. What's really important in this sentence is bolded here:

Researchers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, hosted by the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, have recently discovered that molecules of water, comprised of hydrogen and oxygen atoms, makes items in which it comes in contact with wet.

And notice that all the important stuff comes after the first clause is broken off. "Molecules" is really the subject of the second clause, making the backstory "researchers have recently discovered that..." irrelevant. Seeing that, you can then eliminate the modifying phrase "comprised of..." AND the modifying phrase "of water", and you're left with just:

"molecules makes items in which it comes in contact with wet"

and that's clearly both a pronoun and S-V error. In these long sentences, if you read an introductory clause or see a modifying phrase without an error, try reading the rest of the sentence as though that extra component wasn't there, and you can often isolate what's really important and then check that portion throughout the rest of the answer choices.