On any CAT test there are always trade-offs between speed and accuracy. Nowhere is this truer than Reading Comprehension. Reading Comprehension is an open-book test. In theory, with unlimited time, you should never get an RC question wrong. The first step to improving performance on Reading Comprehension questions, therefore, is to find that time. By improving your speed and efficiency with Text Completion and Sentence Equivalence questions, you leave yourself more time to spend on Reading Comprehension. When you become a master of the other two question types, you free yourself up to relax and take your time on RC where time equals points.
There are three types of questions you might see with Reading Comprehension:
These are the standard, five choice, multiple-choice questions we have been doing. There is only one correct answer choice and four wrong ones.
These are a variation of the old roman numeral questions. Remember the ones that gave you three statements marked I, II, and III, and the answer choices that said, “I only,” “I and II only,” “I, II, and III”? These are the same, but without the answer choices. They will give you three statements, with a box next to each. You have to select all that apply. The process is the same. Find lead words and look for proof.
In this case, ETS will ask you to select a sentence in the passage that makes a particular point, raises a question, provides proof, or some other function. These questions will appear primarily on short passages. If one appears on a longer passage, they will limit the scope to a particular paragraph. Again, the same rules apply. Pick a lead word. Put the question in your own words, and use Process of Elimination. To answer one of these, you will literally click on a particular sentence in the passage or paragraph.
Reading Comprehension is the most time-intensive portion of the Verbal test. Deciding how much time to allocate to the passage is another way to pick up valuable time without sacrificing accuracy. The amount of time you devote will depend upon four primary factors. They are Difficulty Level, Length, Skill Set, and Number of Questions.
RULES TO LIVE BY: You can always read more IF you have to, but you never want to read more THAN you have to.
Always, you want to take the easy test first. There is an enormous range in the difficulty level of the different passages you will see. There is no law that says that you have to do the questions in the order in which they are given. If you come across a particularly impenetrable question—and you’ll know pretty quickly if you do—just skip it and leave it for the end.
Passages on the GRE come in two lengths: those that fit on a screen and those that force you to scroll. Scrolling is a nuisance. If the passage is so short that it fits on one screen, you might as well just read it. You’ll probably end up reading the whole thing anyway.
Some people can skim, some cannot. Which are you? Can you skim quickly and still pick up the main idea of a passage? Or, when you skim do you either miss the main idea or get sucked into the details? If you are inclined to get sucked in, you will get sucked in, and you shouldn’t try to skim at all. Use 2-1-1-F instead.
The test will tell you how many questions are associated with a particular passage. If the next two or three questions are based upon the same passage, it’s worth your time to read more of it.
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You can always read more if you need to, but you don’t ever want to read more than you have to in order to answer a particular question. If you see a short passage with two questions in the first ten, you should read the whole thing. If you see a long passage with one question in the last few minutes, and you have more questions to get to, just bubble in and move on. For anything else, you will need a moderated approach. A great place to start is 2-1-1-F. This means that you read the first sentence of the passage, the first sentence of each additional paragraph, and the last sentence of the passage. This should be sufficient to get the GIST of the passage. Remember, if you need to read more, you always can.
If you get a Reading Comprehension question wrong, it is for one of the three reasons. Either you misread something in the passage, misread the question, or misread one of the answer choices. The basic approach is designed to give some rigor to your interaction with each of these main components.
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The first thing to do, naturally, is to read the question. Specifically, you should put your finger or pencil literally on the screen and read the question word for word. Misreading the question is one of the most common causes of errors. Reading with a pencil or finger, word for word, is a good habit, especially for strong readers who tend to skip over words without even noticing.
After a few hours of testing, it is all too easy for the eyes to glaze over and to read without really comprehending. To ensure that the words aren’t simply going in one eyeball and out the other, you will want to engage in the question in a qualitative way. Most questions, you will notice, aren’t really questions at all. They are incomplete sentences. The easiest way to own the question is to actually make it back into a question. The easiest way to do this is to simply start with the word “What” or “Why,” and then to let the rest follow (any question-word will do, but the vast majority of questions either ask “What was stated in the passage?” or “Why was it said?”).
Never attempt to answer a question from memory. The minute you stop reading you start forgetting. ETS counts on this and plays with the answer choices to change your recollection of the information. You must look at the information in context, but you don’t have to read the whole paragraph. Choose a word from the question that will be easy to find in the passage, skim for it, and then read five lines above it to five lines below it. That should be sufficient to answer the question.
Before you get to the answer choices, stop and answer the question in your own words. When you do this, you will know exactly what you are looking for in the answer choices. With your own answer choice in mind, you will be protected from the tricks and traps that ETS has laid for you with theirs. After turning the question into a question, this is the most frequently blown off step; they are both among the most important. If you have followed steps 1 through 4, typically, one answer choice will look correct and the other four will look ridiculous. This is precisely the position you want.
There are three general characteristics that separate correct answers from incorrect ones. As you work through the drills, note these types whenever you see them. Over time you will develop an instinct for right versus wrong answers.
ETS plays it safe. Correct answers are wishy-washy or very difficult to prove false. It is too easy to find exceptions to extreme answer choices. For this reason, they are almost never correct. Remember, to ETS it doesn’t matter what the passages says. They don’t write the passages, but they do write the questions and the answers. They can choose to word correct or incorrect answers any way they like. They choose to do it in a way that won’t put them on the phone with dozens of experts in various fields who beg to differ with them.
If you can not physically put your finger on a specific word, line, phrase, or sentence that proves that your answer choice is correct, you cannot choose it. ETS loves to add to answer choices little bits and bobs that were never stated in the passage. If a passage is about a recent immigrant’s first experience of America, ETS will widen the scope of an answer choice to include all immigrants. If the passage is about the existence of heavy metals on some planets, an incorrect answer choice will talk about all planets.
What’s wrong with the answer choices?
Many of the answer choices simply don’t make any sense. Just because you see it on the GRE doesn’t mean you have to take it seriously. Science passages may have answer choices that are highly illogical or physically impossible. Humanities passages may have answer choices that support different or even opposite views than those of the author, and certainly ones that ETS could never stand behind. And some answer choices are just downright ridiculous.
RULES TO LIVE BY: If you cannot physically put your finger on a specific word, line, phrase, or sentence that proves that your answer choice is correct, you cannot pick it.
In general, you want to be doing, not thinking. Thinking gets you into trouble. The best way to tell if you are thinking rather than doing is to pay attention to your hands. If your hands are not moving, you are either spacing out, lost, or attempting to do work in your head—all are bad. The use of scratch paper, therefore, is as critical to the Verbal portion as it is to the math. Proper use of the scratch paper will help you stay on track, organize your thinking, and maintain an efficient, meticulous, and systematic approach.
The Process of POE is, in essence, a two-pass approach. In the first pass, walk through the answer choices asking a simple question: Maybe or Gone? “Gone” refers to the answer choice can be eliminated with confidence; “maybe” refers to everything else. This pass should take no more than 15 seconds. You are not looking for the correct answer. On this pass, you don’t want to invest a lot of time in any one answer choice, because often the correct answer will be very clear, or you will be able to eliminate the other four. Remember that you have already found proof and answered the question in your own words. Correct and incorrect answer choices should leap out at you at this point. Only if you are left with two or three do you need to investigate further.
Make sure that you park your thinking on the page as you go; otherwise you are doing two separate jobs. One is assessing the answer choices; the other is keeping track of what you’ve already decided about prior answer choices. This is confusing and inefficient. It is much better to simply park it on the page.
To do this you can use three basic symbols.
“Wrong” means that it is clearly wrong and therefore gone. You never need to spend any time on this answer choice again. “Maybe” simply means that it is possible or you’re not sure. “Yes” means that it looks good. You are making these assessments through a combination of information you have acquired in the passage, and the three elimination techniques listed above. In the last ten, you might even stop here if you have two “maybes” or a clear winner. In the first ten questions, you must go back to the passage to find proof.
Here is what the two passes might look like on a short passage in the first ten questions. In this case, you should have read the entire passage.
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This first pass took about 15−20 seconds. You eliminated some obvious choices and got it down to two. Then, on the second pass, to go back to the passage to check your proof. Paraphrase the remaining answer choices to make sure you are reading them correctly. Remember that there is only one correct answer. If you are absolutely sure that both are correct, you are misreading something. As usual, the correct answer is a clear, if awkward, paraphrase of something stated in the passage (the awkwardness is an obvious attempt to steer us away from this answer choice). The second choice is stated, but it’s encouraged, not discouraged.
In the second pass, pay no attention to answer choices (A), (D), or (E) because they have already been eliminated. Occasionally you will end up eliminating all five; only in this case will you go back and reassess an answer choice you have already eliminated.
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To sum up, read only as much as you have to and follow these five steps for all questions:
There are three things to keep in mind when working on Reading Comprehension:
Above all: Find proof in the passage for every answer you select. If there’s no proof, it’s not the right answer.
For a more detailed description and more examples of these techniques, reference Cracking the GRE.
