Almost everyone begins preparing for the GRE verbal section by studying vocabulary. While having a strong vocabulary is essential for success on “short verbal” questions (text completions and sentence equivalences), these problems only comprise half of the verbal questions that students see on test day. The other half consists of reading comprehension, and many test-takers severely neglect this section of the test because they see reading comp success as being dependant on having previous knowledge about a topic, or on being able to select the “better” answer out of multiple possible correct answers. In fact, these are both misconceptions: Two of Kaplan’s reading comp mantras are “The answer is in the passage”, and “one choice is correct, while four choices are flawed”.
Reading comprehension can be approached just as strategically as can any other question-type, and knowing exactly how to tackle passages and questions will give test-takers an advantage over their less-prepared competition. What many students don’t realize is that it’s to their benefit to approach single-paragraph passages differently from multi-paragraph passages. Longer passages have multiple questions assigned to them, so students need to read and take one or two brief notes on each paragraph before going to the questions – doing so will ensure that they have a clear understanding of the passage’s structure and the author’s key points, which will allow them to answer several questions without confusing information from the passage with what’s written in tempting incorrect answer choices.
Single-paragraph passages, on the other hand, often only have one question assigned to them, so there’s no need to take notes on the entire paragraph before looking at the question. Instead, the most efficient approach is to read the question stem first, so that the student knows exactly what he’s looking for when he goes to the paragraph. Knowing what the question is asking allows the reader to take the paragraph apart with laser-like precision and often allows him to predict the correct answer – in this case, he then merely needs to scan the answer choices to determine which one matches his prediction. Even if the question is not one to which the answer can be determined before reading the choices, reading the passage first lets the reader characterize the information that the correct answer must contain – this also makes quick work of the answer choices.
For an example of this approach, check out this video to see Kaplan GRE expert Adi Hanash take apart a short reading comp question.
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