I wasn’t very good at RC the last time I took GMAT but this time I followed a simple strategy and it worked well for me.
This is what you can try to do :
- Get used to reading on the computer. I can’t stress this enough. Just keep reading stuff on the net regularly to get used to reading on the screen. Whenever you are reading something, stop periodically and ask yourself if you know what you read in the last 5 paragraphs, if you not then it means you are reading passively. You have to be an active reader.
- Giver yourself 3 or even 4 minutes to read the passage slowly and clearly. Do not get stressed about the 2 minutes deadline that a lot of books stress about.
- Understand each line, do not give up when you hit technical jargon or skim over details.
- At the end quickly try to get a sense of the passage by prephasing in your mind answers to two questions:
Overall what was the author trying to say? What was his tone?
IF you have clarity about these 2 questions and the overall understanding then you can easily answer the questions attached to the passage in less than a minute.
However, if you skim over the passage and assume that you can come back to it and in the process don’t get a sense of what the passage is all about then you will not be able to answer the questions correctly and you would have only wasted 2 precious minutes of your time.
Practice as much as you can however, try to do questions only from sources that have good explanations. You will not learn much from doing problems from sources which do not have explanations for wrong answers.
All the best!
