Building a GMAT Reading Comprehension Strategy

Reading Comprehension is one of the most essential parts of the GMAT exam. While most of the people consider it to be the toughest sub-sections out of all, it actually requires the right GMAT reading comprehension strategy to be tackled. The GMAT Verbal section has three components – Reading Comprehension, Sentence Correction & Critical Reasoning out of which the GMAT reading comprehension is the most time consuming. Hence, building a GMAT Reading Comprehension strategy becomes crucial.

The GMAT Verbal Section consists a fixed number of 36 questions in total. There will be roughly 3-4 GMAT RC passages out of those, and each one will have 3-4 multiple-choice type questions. Thus, there will be 9–16 questions of GMAT reading comprehension.

GMAT Reading Comprehension Strategy | Importance of Building a Reading Habit

To ace the GMAT RC section, you need to develop a reading habit. Habitual reading helps you gain focus, comprehend and improve your vocabulary. Reading is the best GMAT reading comprehension strategy. Subscribe to an editorial, or newspaper; read blogs, online essays, short stories, anything you can find. Go for different genres as the GMAT RC passages are also related to different genres, such as, History, Science & Technology, Economics, Philosophy, Literature, etc. Reading also helps with increasing your knowledge in certain domains.

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A regular reading habit increases your focus by several folds. Make sure that while you read, you also analyse the tone of the passage and what the author wants to convey. Try summarizing it later for a better understanding.

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GMAT Reading Comprehension Strategy : Tackling RCs Step-By-Step 

1. Read the Passage Carefully

The first and foremeost step while tackling a GMAT RC passage is to read it very carefully. Very often, some people first go through the questions and then read the passage. However, this strategy to tackle the GMAT RC is not recommended. This is because, reading the passage after going through the questions will create a bias in your mind which will make you go and look after the answer. While doing so, you might miss an important point or keyword. Hence, the right GMAT reading comprehension strategy is to read the passage first and then read the questions.

2. Comprehend As You Read

You do not have a lot of time in hand. So, make sure that whenever you practice the GMAT RC passages, you keep summarising and comprehending the passage in your mind. Reading an entire passage takes up a lot of time. So, as you only have a limited time frame in the exam, you cannot afford to go back and re-read the entire passage to answer each of the questions. So keep the passages and location of the keywords in your mind in such a way that one glance at the passage can get you the answer.

3. Start Connecting the Sentences

Since each GMAT Reading Comprehension has a coherent underlying theme, understanding how sentences and paragraphs relate to one another is essential for effective comprehension. This GMAT RC strategy is essential to answering questions about inference and detail accurately since they both explicitly and implicitly relate to the material in the passage. Correct inferences require a thorough comprehension of the relationships between sentences.

4. Summarise Passages While Practising

While you are in the GMAT preparation phase, the basic GMAT reading comprehension strategy would be to prepare a summary for the articles you read. With time, you’ll start summarising the passages in your mind and catching the keywords, transition words, etc. This practice will help oneself in higher retention which in turn will help in time optimization while solving GMAT RCs.

5. The “Rule of Elimination”

Now that we know how to go through the passage, let us now come to the options. In a typical GMAT Reading comprehension passage, you’ll be provided with five options to choose from for each question. Use the elimination tool to find out the right answer. First of all, find out the options that are vague and eliminate them. After this, if you are left with 2-3 options you’re confused between, go through the part of the passage concerned with the question again, carefully and you’ll fing the rigt answer.

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GMAT Reading Comprehension Strategy : 6 Things to Comprehend

As comprehension passages mark a significant weightage in your CAT exam, you mustn’t ignore the section. You must develop an interest in world affairs and literature. Following are 5 important things to take care of while reading a GMAT RC passage. This is a very important part of your GMAT reading comprehension strategy.

1. Know the structure: Most of the GMAT reading comprehension passages follow a set structure. There is an introduction, a body and a conclusion. Look for sentences that change the English passage’s topic. Mark them as important. Highlight the essence of each topic, what they are talking about.
2. Look out for potential keywords: Each passage must have certain keywords around which the central idea that you must include in your GMAT reading comprehension strategy. Mark such keywords in your GMAT exam and move ahead with your reading. They will help you in answering the questions that will follow.
3. Try prediction: You can also try to predict what the author might say in the next paragraph as you’re reading. This will reinforce your understanding of the passage.
4. Central idea: Always focus on the main idea of the GMAT RC. Do not focus much on the minor details of the paragraph. As the passages are full of fillers, ignoring them while reading would save you a lot of time in the end.
5. Analyse the style and tone of the RC: The style related question, will probe the applicant about the author’s diction, tone, and word choice in the text they are reading. The candidate’s ability to accurately determine the author’s choice of words and overall tone to determine the mood and thinking process behind the RC will be tested by this style question. The candidate’s capacity to recognise and evaluate the attitude, motivation, viewpoint, etc. behind the paragraph is most crucial part of the GMAT reading comprehension strategy because the author won’t clearly indicate these things.
6. Build a good enough vocabulary: By reading enough comprehension passages and memorising the meaning of difficult words, you will easily answer the GMAT RC passages. You can start by learning about root words, as they will help you identify the meaning of the unknown words, then gradually move on towards antonyms and synonyms of complex/common words.

GMAT Reading Comprehension Strategy: 4 Mistakes To Avoid

1. Do Not Jump Through Sections

The GMAT reading comprehension section is one of those sections that need a very high concentration level. Every section requires a different mindset to solve the questions. Jumping from one section to another deviates your focus, hence creating a confusing situation for you. Trying to master many strategies for different sections prevents learning outcomes because doing so causes us to divide our concentration among numerous topics.

2. Do Not Overspeed

The prime focus should be accuracy and not speed. This GMAT reading comprehension strategy, as previously mentioned always stands true. GMAT RCs need to be tackled carefully and patiently. In order to get your answers correct, you need to comprehend the entire passage thoroughly for the tone, style, main idea and the gist of the GMAT RC. Overspeeding will make you miss out on some important details. Hence, always remember that “Slow and Steady Wins the Race.”

3. Read the ENTIRE RC Passage

Some people have a predefined notion that the first two and last two lines of the GMAT reading comprehension passage is enough to make sense of the entire passage which is absolutely not true. Answering the questions correctly requires a thorough understanding of the entire passage. Reading and comprehending is the best GMAT Reading Comprehension strategy just as the name suggests.

4. Simplify the GMAT Reading Comprehension Questions

It is essential that you first of all understand what a particular question is talking about. Questions asking about the style, tone, main idea, etc. of the passage are very direct and do not need any simplification. But other inference based and application based questions require simplification as they consist of several words entwined together that may create a confusion in understanding them. Apart from this, carefully going through the answer options is also important.

Through this article, we have explained the GMAT RC strategy one should opt for. Implementing this will bring immense improvement in your GMAT scores.

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