【瓜瓜出品】GMATTestprep阅读精解..docVIP

Testprep阅读精解 The verbal portion of the test consists of three types of questions: Reading Comprehension, Arguments, and Sentence Correction. They are designed to tes t your ability to reason using the written word. There is roughly the same n umber of each type of question, for a total of 41 questions. READING COMPREHENSION FORMAT The GMAT reading comprehension section passages are about 200 to 400 words l ong. The subject matter of a passage can be almost anything, but the most co mmon themes are politics, history, culture, science, and business. READING METHODS Some books recommend speed-reading the passages. This is a mistake. Speed re ading is designed for ordinary, nontechnical material. Because this material is filled with fluff, you can skim over the nonessential parts and still get the gist--and often more--of the passage. However, GMAT passages are den se. Some are actual quoted articles. Most often, however, they are based on articles that have been condensed to about one-third their original length. During this process no essential information is lost, just the fluff is cu t. This is why speed reading will not work here--the passages contain too mu ch information. You should, however, read somewhat faster than you normally do, but not to the point that your comprehension suffers. You will have to e xperiment to find your optimum pace. Many books recommend reading the questions before the passage. But there are two big problems with this method. First, some of the questions are a parag raph long, and reading a question twice can use up precious time. Second, th ere are up to seven questions per passage, and psychologists have shown that we can hold in our minds a maximum of about three thoughts at any one time (some of us have trouble simply remembering phone numbers). After reading al l seven questions, the student will turn to the passage with his mind cloude d by ha