Here’s a type of problem that’s caused no end of consternation to a lot of my students:

Residents of this state are obligated to renew their driver’s license in two circumstances only: if they accumulate six or more points in moving violations, or if they obtain citizenship in another country. Clarice, who is a citizen of only this country, has been involved in only one accident, which added three points to her license. Therefore, Clarice has no reason to renew her driver’s license at this time.

The argument above depends on which of the following assumptions?

I’m not going to show you the answer choices because the essence of this problem needs to be taken care of long before you ever look at a single choice. When I ask my students for the assumption, I invariably hear answers such as the following:

- “The author assumes that Clarice didn’t receive points from sources other than accidents.”

- “The author assumes that Clarice wasn’t already a citizen of some other place.”

- “The author assumes that Clarice didn’t do something else that would make her have to renew her license.”

All of these wrong answers fall for the same trap: thinking in the way that the test makers want you to think. The test makers say, “Hey! Look at these conditions. Clarice didn’t meet any of them. So, there’s no reason for her to renew her license.” And a lot people look at that line of reasoning and say, “Aha! I bet Clarice DID meet one of those conditions, in some sneaky way.” Then they start drumming up clever ways to force poor Clarice to retake her driver’s exam.

This is what I like to call going down the wrong rabbit hole. The test makers show you a rabbit hole, saying basically, “Hey, you! Think about THIS.” And so you think about whatever “this” is, and you think about it really hard, and the problem is that you shouldn’t have even started thinking along those lines in the first place.

Let’s back up a bit.

Consider this argument:

Boris isn’t obligated to exercise. Therefore, there is no reason for Boris to exercise.

Or how about this one:

There is no law mandating that Boris be kind to his mother. Therefore, he should be a jerk to her.

How do those arguments sound? Terrible, you say?! But why? If I’m not required to do something, doesn’t that mean I have no reason to do it?

Here, again, is the argument about Clarice, but condensed to the essentials:

Clarice isn’t required to renew her driver’s license. Therefore, she has no reason to renew her driver’s license.

It’s tricky to spot the error the first time someone throws you an argument like this, because renewing a driver’s license is boring and lame, so your brain fills in the gap in the argument: “The only reason anyone would ever renew their license was if they had to.” But that’s not necessarily true: that’s an assumption. Maybe Clarice gets a tax credit for renewing her license, or renewing the license will get some of her points taken away, or renewing the license provides some other benefit to something completely unrelated. We don’t know.

Remember this nugget of logical wisdom when you take the GRE: just because a person isn’t required to do something, doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t or they won’t!

In this entry and in this one, I discussed two patterns of reasoning that can help you unravel tough problems in GRE reading comprehension. Today our logical journey continues with a look at a classic GRE reasoning flaw of a more quantitative bent: confusing numbers with percentages.

Here’s a silly argument that showcases the flaw nicely:

Common wisdom holds that crossing the street at a corner is safer than jaywalking (that is, crossing in the middle). But annual statistics show that many more pedestrians are hit by cars while crossing at a corner than while jaywalking. Hence, our common intuition is wrong: pedestrians who jaywalk are actually safer than those who don’t.

Are you convinced? I sure hope not, because if so you’ve just dramatically decreased your life expectancy. This argument supports a claim about safety — which is a matter of percentages — with evidence that deals in pure numbers. That’s how the GRE makes such a goofy claim sound so good. The spuriousness (vocab word!) of this reasoning comes to light easily with the help of our old friend, picking numbers. Consider:

Number of corner-crossers: 100
Number of injured corner-crossers: 11

Number of jaywalkers: 10
Number of injured jaywalkers: 10

What’s more dangerous? Jaywalking, clearly — 100% of those people got rammed by cars! Yet the number of law-abiding street-crossers who got injured is greater, simply because there are many more of those people to begin with.

Note that not all GRE arguments use numbers and percentages incorrectly — some do it right. But whenever math comes up in a GRE verbal problem, look closely at the author’s logic to make sure its numeric and proportional crossovers aren’t ridiculous.

Right from the start of class, Heather and I were in frequent email contact, figuring out how she should structure her study time so she could take her test a couple weeks after the end of a twice a week class. She was a diligent, goal-oriented student.

Her Test Day came, and she fell short of the scores she needed to be considered for the grad program she wanted. Her math score was a little over what she needed, but her verbal score was significantly below an acceptable level.

This is the point where too many potential graduate students passively accept their inadequate score fate, feeling powerless over what seems like an insurmountable obstacle.

“I’m over this test” she wrote to me. I replied, “You don’t strike me as someone who just gives up. Give yourself the day to stew, and then let’s get practical.” I sent my phone number, she sent hers, and although I was away on vacation, we arranged for a good time to talk.

Heather also wrote back that she’d calmed down after a run and talking to her parents and to a fellow student, a year ahead of her, who took the test 4 times until she got a barely adequate score, and now she’s in grad school.

We worked together to set up a specific set of strategies and a study schedule.  Heather repeated some class sessions, partly to see if she could get some new insights, and partly just to keep up her studies.  She committed to learning as many of the top 500 vocabulary words as possible (she got all but about 30 of them). She practiced eliminating wrong answer choices to improve her chances of getting right answers with strategic guessing.

To hone her reading comprehension skills, we came up with the idea of reading articles from economist.com, newyorker.com, ft.com and terryteachout.com. The idea was to read challenging writing quickly, actively and critically.

She stayed in touch, reporting on what she was working on. You can do something similar with a friend or family member; the point is to have someone–a “coach”– who’ll keep encouraging you to stick with your work and help you past the times when you feel stuck or frustrated.

Test Day #3 arrived, and I have to admit, I was nervous! The phone rang late that day, with Heather’s number on the caller ID. She did it! She maintained her math score and improved her verbal score so significantly that she could have her applications considered.

Today, Heather is in the middle of her first year in her first choice grad school program. She grabs me on Gchat periodically to catch up and let me know how things are going in school. Hearing from her always makes my day, and I’m glad to be able to share her story with you. My hope is that you can take a cue from the Heather’s persistence and focus in order to drive you toward GRE Test Day success.

The Kaplan New GRE Verbal Workbook includes a chapter devoted to Reading Comprehension, as well as sets of practice questions and additional resources. One of these resources is a list of additional tips for tackling the Reading Comprehension section, including Bolded Statements questions. These tips are found on pages 78-80, and I’m going to borrow from them here.

There are differences between real-world reading and reading GRE passages is that on the GRE:

• On Test Day, you don’t care about the facts in the passage — you only care about ideas. A passage might tell you that the character Superman first appeared in 1938. You don’t care what year Superman was introduced, but you care about WHY the author told you that. The passage may then go on to describe how the powers attributed to Superman have changed over time. In that case, knowing that Superman has been around for 70+ years might be important.
• Prior knowledge is not welcome on Test Day. Forget everything you might know about Superman — everything  you need to know will be contained within the passage. Wrong answer choices play on things that test-takers understand to be logically true, but if those facts aren’t mentioned in the passage, you don’t care.
• If a passage tells you Superman has a twin sister, then as far as you are concerned, he has a twin sister. The passage text is TRUE. Period. You may question texts as much as you like in real-world reading, but on the GRE, accept that whatever the passage is telling you is correct.

Bolded Statement questions should be tackled the same way as other Reading Comprehension question types. In these questions, you REALLY don’t care about the facts or details. You ONLY care about the purpose of the statements, and you consider each statement separately. Is it an opinion? An example? An argument? If it is an argument, is it the passage’s primary or secondary argument, or perhaps a counterargument? Is it evidence, and if so, of what? You care about the purpose of each statement in relation to the other sentences in the passage.

Let me repeat that. Just as with other question types, you must consider Bolded Statements in the context of the passage as a whole. Do not skip the un-bold statements; they are your context clues for figuring out the role the Bolded Statements play.

Have a question about grammar, punctuation, usage, or style? Email me at jennifer.land@kaplan.com and put “blog question” in your subject line. Then look for a response here!

Additionally, reading novels and certain newspapers and magazines (the ones that don’t cater to a fifth-grade reading level – all apologies to USA Today and People magazine, which are just fine for their purpose of informing and entertaining) will aid you in realizing heretofore unexplored words. However, perhaps even better fodder for the acquisition of headier, grad-level words can be found by examining trade journals and works of non-fiction. Try delving into the dense prose that can readily be found in such word hordes as The Wall Street Journal or Architectural Digest.  Not into mergers and acquisitions?  Is the study of buttresses not to your liking?  Indeed, if you search with the slightest zest, you can locate a vocabulary-invigorating periodical that may actually speak to your own interests.

Moreover, since the New GRE Verbal section is known to traffic in questions concerning the logical analysis of arguments, your reading and appraising such content in political or economic publications, for instance, can’t help but serve you synchronous benefits.

Acquiring a rich and test-ready vocabulary via contextual clues found within the writing of an intelligent author rather than simply studying the dry drudgery of flashcards or daily list o’ words repetition is much more intuitive, organic, and heaven forbid, fun!

After all, The New GRE now limits its assessment of your word knowledge to sentence equivalence, text completions and words-in-context of reading comp passages.  Since the GRE has retired its tired format of testing words in a vacuum (antonyms and analogies), why not learn them in a similar manner to that in which they are tested?

“Almost all of the answer choices in the Reading Comp section seem like they could be correct – it’s hopeless…”

If you haven’t uttered one of the above statements about the GRE’s Reading Comp questions, then you are probably somewhere in the spectrum between these two attitudes of naively confident and unduly uncertain.

Indeed, you will need to know how to read – but your present activity proves that you are in check with that prerequisite…

So, testing more than just your ability to discern words from groups of letters, the GRE attempts to assess your ability to think critically and read strategically – with purpose.  Moreover, the Reading Comp passages and their corresponding questions are measuring your analytical skills as they are performed under time constraints.  Specifically, how well can you determine the best definition of a word in context?  Given detailed and dense prose, are you able to identify an author’s tone and then determine her main idea and purpose?  Rather than only partake in the inefficiency of time-intensive rereading, can you initially glean information from text and then perceive ideas in such a manner as to draw accurate inferences from them?

The answer is YES, you can…but only if you learn to read in a way much differently than most folks tend to read books at the beach, differently even than the method you probably used to read text books to earn your degree.  Strategic reading is a skill and, as such, it requires methodology built around it and – here it comes – practice!

Great preparation for GRE success must include learning and practicing a device for efficiently and proficiently gathering sufficient data and intelligence from our initial read so that we can adeptly answer 1-3 questions while making only quick, referent analysis of the passage.

Far from having multiple correctly-worded answer choices (although the New GRE does now include questions, “Select all that apply” which have multiple answer choices that are correct), the traditional multiple-choice question has only one choice which is worded in such a way to be correct given the stated question.  Furthermore, the other 4 choices have serious flaws, however hidden to us those flaws may seemingly feel.  It’s NOT about feel, this task is categorical and the passage will “tell” us all that we need it to, thus allowing us to predict the right choice, if only we are well-trained and well-practiced in the scheme of skills to do so.

Oh, you haven’t heard about that yet? I should back up and start at the beginning then…

Reading Comprehension on the GRE has traditionally been similar to that on other standardized tests.  You may remember the staple question types, such as Global, Detail, and Inference questions, to name a few. Well-honed passage mapping techniques make the process for answering such questions fairly routine. In fact, if you’re like me, you may have found your brain on autopilot as you zipped through your last set of Reading Comprehension questions as that tiny voice inside your head gently cried out for a bigger challenge. Imagine my surprise and delight when I cracked open one of the brand spanking new Reading Comp passages for the new GRE and saw question stems like the following:

Which of the following statements, if true, would most seriously weaken the position of the legislature’s critics?

Which of the following scenarios would best support the author’s theory?

Meet the Reading Comprehension Reasoning Questions

So what are these new Reasoning Questions, and how am I supposed to handle them? Glad you asked! Logical Reasoning questions can ask you to strengthen or weaken a given argument, spot an unstated assumption, or point out a flaw in the author’s reasoning. Some passages will even have highlighted statements and corresponding questions that ask about their purpose or relationship. The common thread here is more critical thinking and less memorizing of passage material. (Three guesses as to why the GRE would be interested in testing such skills!)

“So if these questions just came out of the blue, how can Kaplan or anyone else prepare me for them?”  I can’t speak for anyone else, but Kaplan can easily prepare you for them. Why is that? Well, it just so happens that, while Reasoning Questions are new to Reading Comprehension on the GRE, they are old hat with LSAT and GMAT, two other standardized exams that Kaplan has tons of experience preparing test takers like yourself for. That’s right—they may be fresh off the assembly line for the new GRE, but Kaplan has actually been preparing people to ace Reasoning Questions for decades.

So when that sneaky GRE passage tries to surprise you with these quirky new questions on Test Day, just smile. While Reasoning Questions may be unexpected by your competition, you will already have the inside scoop on how they work!

After less than a semester of business school, the following GMAT/GRE topics have already proven indispensable to my success:

1) Fractions: Oh yes, it’s third-grade math back to haunt you! Specific example? In Accounting, we study various financial ratios that determine the health of the business. For instance, the current ratio, a measure of solvency, is calculated by dividing current assets by current liabilities. A question that appeared on my midterm read as follows: If a company sells land for cash at a loss, how does that affect the current ratio? To answer this question, you need to know how a fraction changes when the numerator goes down and the denominator stays the same. My professor could ask this question about any financial ratio, numerator or denominator.

2) Reading Comprehension: In my Management class, we are assigned anywhere from 20-70 pages of reading each week, most of it dense theoretical stuff, some of it highly-detailed case study. There is very little review of the material in class—you are expected to come having read it and ready to discuss your analysis of the work. Woe to he who comes underprepared, or having focused on the wrong details! (I’ve seen it happen—it’s ugly.) Reading lots of dense prose quickly and being able to cut through the detail to get at the important bits—sounds a lot like Reading Comp to me.

3) Essay Writing: My final in the aforementioned Management class will consist of 10 short-form essay questions, such as “Discuss the structural changes that typically occur as small start-up firms grow and mature. Explain why these changes typically occur. Explain how management needs to adapt its leadership style as their firm grows and matures.” It’s a three-hour test, so I will have 18 minutes to read, digest, formulate a response based on 4 months’ worth of course material, and write up a reply to each. At least the GMAT gives you 30 minutes!

4) Order of Operations (PEMDAS): This might actually be first-grade math, back again with a vengeance in b-school. In learning about the time value of money, we learned an equation represented by the following (take a deep breath):

PV_annuity = (FV_annuitypmt /i)∗[1-1/(1+i)ⁿ]

Can you guess what happened when my classmates attempted this equation? Yep, quite a few of them got zero. Why? Because when the equation is written horizontally, the numerator of the rightmost fraction appears to be 1-1…or zero. But, if we recall our Order of Operations, or PEMDAS, from our GMAT/GRE preparations, we remember that division comes before subtraction, and divide 1 by (1+i)ⁿ before subtracting the whole thing from 1. Could the prof have written the equation more clearly? Sure. But did knowing my order of operations make the problem easier? Heck yes.

Oh and by the way, that particular equation also contains exponents. So yeah, those? Also relevant.

So, I’m not even done with my first semester, and already these topics appear, completely relevant to what I’m studying. I am an even more firm believer now that the skills tested on standardized tests map to the skills needed to succeed in business school. As tempting as it is to shrug off these exams as nonsense…would you have read the present-value equation correctly the first time? If you studied your PEMDAS, you would.

***

This article is part of a series of posts by Amanda D’Avria about her experiences applying to, being accepted to, and attending business school. To see the other entries in this series, please click here.

]]> http://blog.kaplangradprep.com/2011/05/11/standardized-tests-and-business-school-skills/feed/ 0 http://blog.kaplangradprep.com/2011/02/21/how-to-tame-your-asiatic-lion-global-questions-under-control-part-iii/ http://blog.kaplangradprep.com/2011/02/21/how-to-tame-your-asiatic-lion-global-questions-under-control-part-iii/#comments Mon, 21 Feb 2011 15:00:38 +0000 Laura Aitcheson http://blogs.kaptest.com/GRE/?p=306 This article is the third part of a series that breaks down the most important Reading Comprehension question types. Click here for Part I and Part II.

Asiatic lions are easily lost amid the trees as they move stealthily through India’s Gir Forest National Park. Similarly, the correct answers for Global questions are often missed if test-takers focus too closely on distracting details. Happily, just as zoologists have learned how to track these beautiful creatures, you too can find success in identifying the right answer on Test Day.

To begin, Global questions always ask about the Reading Comprehension passage as a whole and use wording like, “primary purpose,” “primarily concerned with,” and “main idea.” Since the correct answer must reflect the main idea of the entire passage, you can immediately eliminate any answer choices that refer only to one paragraph out of the entire passage, since they are simply too narrow to reflect the author’s main purpose. You can also cross off any answer choices that are too extreme. The tone of a GRE passage is always within a range of slightly negative to slightly positive, which means they are never hyperbolic. When you see answer choices with the words like always, never, best, or worst, you can happily eliminate them and increase your odds of choosing the correct answer. In addition, you can do a vertical scan in which you look at just the first word within the five answer choices. Oftentimes, you will read verbs like, “encouraging, describing, criticizing, comparing, resolving” or “convince, recommend, dispute, examine.” In this situation, you can eliminate verbs that mischaracterize the author’s overall purpose in writing the passage. Almost always, an answer choice that contains the word “criticizing” will be too extreme.Sometimes, simply finding the correct verb to describe the author’s purpose is enough to narrow the answer choices down to two, or even one!

Keep in mind that with Global questions (as with Detail questions), answer choices can be out of scope. The scope of the passage refers to the specific area within a broader topic that the author addresses with the passage. For example, you may read a passage about the author Virginia Woolf. It would be impossible to cover every aspect of Virginia Woolf’s writing career in one GRE passage, so the scope denotes the particular aspect of Virginia Woolf’s writing that the author discusses. If the passage focuses on the intricacies of two of Woolf’s essays, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, you know that the scope of the passage doesn’t include her more widely known works like novels To the Lighthouse and Orlando. Therefore, you can eliminate any answer choices that refer to parts of Woolf’s other novels, as they are not within the scope of the passage.

The more time you spend in the Gir Forest, the more likely you are to pick out among the trees the majestic glint of the Asiatic lion’s amber eyes. On Test Day, you must be just as deliberate in your search for the right answer. Of course, you will most likely need fewer cans of bug spray.

Waza Park lions may be smaller than their subspecies counterparts, but their teeth are just as sharp. These characteristics are similar to those of Detail questions, which may appear manageable, but require just as much practice as other more ferocious-looking questions. Detail questions test your comprehension of specific things that the passage’s author states, using wording like “according to the passage,” “as stated in line 7,” and “the author makes which of the following statements.” This straightforward question type is a wonderful opportunity to earn a higher score on Test Day, but just as with Waza Park lions, these questions must still be approached with care.

Instead of breezing through this type of question, it is best to stop after reading the question stem, assess the situation (often by locating the relevant detail in the context of the passage) and predict an answer, and then make a purposeful move by matching your prediction to the correct answer choice. In addition, a solid understanding of common wrong answer choices can mean the difference between a copacetic situation like a purring cat and a less favorable outcome like an unexpected pounce.

For Detail questions, one common wrong-answer type is the out-of-scope answer choice. This category includes answer choices that are out of the range of the passage as a whole, but also answer choices that are refer to the wrong part of the passage. When the question gives you a line reference, you do not want to stray too far from where the question directs you. Also, when the question mentions a specific paragraph, beware of answer choices that deal with information from a different paragraph.

Another popular wrong answer choice is a distortion. These wrong answers can be particularly tricky because the answer choice will mention details from the passage, but will twist them so they no longer represent the author’s point. For example, the author may posit that as Jane Austen continued to write, her characters, such as Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, became more representative of pre-feminist ideals. A distortion of this information would be an answer choice that says, “Jane Austen purposefully used Elizabeth Bennet to voice her personal dissatisfaction with uneducated, rural women, an idea that did not permeate her first novel.” You can eliminate this answer choice because while the author did say that Austen’s feminist undertones strengthened throughout her career, the author does not define feminism as a dissatisfaction with uneducated, rural women. Nor does the author say that Austen used her characters purposefully to illustrate pre-feminist ideals. In short, this answer choice is a distortion of the information in the passage.

Misused details can be very alluring answer choices, but just as trained tamers know when to refrain from sticking their hands too close to lions’ noses, practiced test takers stay away from answer choices that, while they reflect something stated at some point within the passage, do not answer the question as it is written. A good example of this type would be an answer choice that states a fact from the passage about one of Austen’s characters, such as “Elizabeth Bennet is now thought of as an archetype of the modern woman,” but does not answer the question posed: “In the third paragraph, the author states that the fact that Jane Austen never married had what impact on her writing?” A more appropriate answer choice would be, “Even if Jane Austen had married, it is likely that her astute observations of social interactions would not be invalidated.” This answer is both supported by the author and specifically addresses the question about Austen’s marital status.

In all, the more exposure you have to approaching Detail questions, the more efficient you will become in discarding wrong answer choices that fall into these common categories. Remember: eliminating four rotten answers is the same thing as finding the one right answer . . . just like dodging four scary pounces from a lion is the same thing as successfully keeping yourself in one piece!