Words, Unlike People, Are Not All Born Equal
Most students who struggle with Reading Comprehension share a common issue: they focus equally on all words in the passage. Some words, however, are not as important as others, and in order to improve our comprehension we must first learn to identify which words we should focus our energy on. You may have noticed that the title of this blog post is difficult to follow; words such as unlike and not are important structural words, since they describe a 180 degree change in meaning. If we speed through the title we are likely to miss something important, and our comprehension level will drop! Instead, let’s come to a complete stop and hold off on the rest of the post until we have milked those structural words for all they’re worth.
The title first makes a comparison (actually an anti-comparison) between words and people, and then separately says that words are not all born equal (for a moment we can ignore the modifier trapped between the commas).
If words are not all born equal, and words are unlike people, one could infer that all people are born equal. Did you get that from the title when you first read it? If you didn’t, you read it too quickly
Is the MBA worth it? Use Critical Reasoning to Decide!
A colleague here at Manhattan GMAT forwarded me this infographic about the value (or lack thereof) of an MBA. Though the author doesn’t explicitly say so, the statistics she chose to display indicate that she believes an MBA is by and large overvalued.
The great irony here, of course, is that the training you get as an MBA is exactly the training that sharpens your ability to think critically about arguments like this one. In fact, that’s what the GMAT actually tests with its Critical Reasoning section. Just to demonstrate, I’d like to break down this infographic from top to bottom, using the same strategy I teach my students: pointing out the (flawed) assumptions necessary to conclude that an MBA is overvalued.
Premise: The cost of an MBA program including expenses is $120,000.
Assumption #1: Students actually pay all of that $120,000.
Attack: I’d estimate that around half of my MBA classmates had some scholarship or corporate support that significantly defrayed their cost. This, by the way, is probably the most underrated reason to ace your GMAT “ a high GMAT score can open the door to many merit-based scholarships.
Flaw Questions on GMAT Critical Reasoning
We’ve talked about various types of Assumption Family questions in the past (find the assumption, strengthen, weaken, and evaluate the conclusion), but we haven’t yet tackled a Flaw question. This is the least frequently tested of the 5 Assumption Family question types, so you can ignore this type if you aren’t looking for an extra-high score. If you do want an 85th+ percentile verbal score, though, then you have to make sure you know how to tackle Flaw questions.
If you haven’t yet, read this article before we try our GMATPrep problem. Then set your timer for 2 minutes and go!
The Most Important GMAT Question I Ever Studied
Every Manhattan instructor is probably able to fondly recall the Official Guide book that they used to ace their GMAT. Or at least that’s what I would have used to say. Now I know that every Manhattan instructor is probably able to fondly recall the Official Guide book that he or she used to ace his or her GMAT. For me it was the school bus-yellow 11th edition that included the most important question I ever studied. If you have the 12th edition of the Official Guide, it’s question #124. The answer choices on this question began with the following split:
sloths hang from trees…
vs
the sloth hangs from trees…
Attacking GMAT Critical Reasoning Problems Part 2: Role Playing with Critical Reasoning
Eliminating Bad Answer Choices will help to save you time and give you better odds at guessing, but bad answer choices are fewer and further between on the more difficult end of the GMAT. Even the correct answer might, at first glance, look irrelevant to the conclusion. Oftentimes on difficult CR questions, students can get down to two or three plausible answer choices, but are forced to guess because they aren’t 100% confident in their answer. And while this is often a good thing” remember the test is adaptive and tough questions often mean that you are doing well” it’s important to have a strategy to help better your chances when you are trying to make that final decision.
One of my favorite TV shows, Pardon the Interruption, used to have a regular feature called Good Cop, Bad Cop. The two hosts would choose an issue in sports and pick sides- will Tiger Woods win the golf tournament this weekend? The good cop would make arguments for why Tiger would win the tournament while the bad cop would make arguments for why he wouldn’t. The set-up was farcical and the hosts would choose sides arbitrarily, but I loved it because you would hear reasoning for both sides of an issue. Neither person argued for the side they truly believed in 100% of the time, but they pretended they cared deeply about one side of an issue, made a case for their side, and would preemptively rebut the argument that they knew the other host would make. That’s how I approach Critical Reasoning on the GMAT- on one question I’m the project manager for Hotco Oil Burners (OG #97) and the next I’m President of Country Z (#66). But no matter what role I’m playing, I am constantly asking myself what would help and hurt my argument. Let’s try a problem out to see how this works:
Where are the Splits? Handling the New GMAT Sentence Correction
A lot of students have reported lately that the Sentence Correction questions on the official test were a lot harder than what they were expecting, or that they’ve been having trouble finding splits (differences) in the answers. Or they find the splits but don’t know how to process them / what to do with them. They narrow down to two answers but then don’t know how to pick between the two “ they can see the differences but aren’t sure of the significance of those differences.
The title of this article is a little bit misleading “ nothing about the SC section is technically new. The proportion of certain types of questions, though, has been changing, and so the section can feel very different (and challenging!) for someone who’s not prepared for that.
Before we dive into our discussion, I also want to mention another major reason why someone might feel that SC (and / or CR and RC) are much harder on the real test: if you’re suffering from mental fatigue late in the test, everything will feel harder. People are more prone to suffer from mental fatigue if they are not taking practice tests under 100% official conditions (including essay + IR, two 8-minute breaks, and so on).
How have things been changing?
Many people have heard by now that meaning is much more commonly tested than it used to be “ GMAC announced this about 9 months ago. Lots of students, though, don’t quite know what to do with that information. This changes what we study, of course, but it also changes what we expect to see when looking at the questions themselves, and it can change the process we use to answer an SC question.
Tackling a GMAT Prep Critical Reasoning Strengthen Problem
This week, we’re going to discuss one of the most common critical reasoning problem types: Strengthen the Conclusion. Strengthen questions belong to the Assumption Family of questions; we’ll talk more about that later.
If you haven’t yet, read this article before we try our GMATPrep problem. Then set your timer for 2 minutes and go!
In many corporations, employees are being replaced by automated equipment in order to save money. However, many workers who lose their jobs to automation will need government assistance to survive, and the same corporations that are laying people off will eventually pay for that assistance through increased taxes and unemployment insurance payments.
Which of the following, if true, most strengthens the author’s argument?
(A) Many workers who have already lost their jobs to automation have been unable to find new jobs.
(B) Many corporations that have failed to automate have seen their profits decline.
(C) Taxes and unemployment insurance are paid also by corporations that are not automating.
(D) Most of the new jobs created by automation pay less than the jobs eliminated by automation did.
(E) The initial investment in machinery for automation is often greater than the short-term savings in labor costs.
Okay, now that you’ve got an answer, let’s use our 4-step CR process.
Step 1: Identify the Question
First, we read the question stem: Read more
Attacking GMAT Critical Reasoning Problems Part 1: Eliminating Bad Answer Choices
GMAT topics generally fall into one of two categories: things that people know and things that people don’t. When the average adult doesn’t know much about a topic, it’s easy to make a GMAT question. Exponents, triangles inscribed in circles, proper usage of the present perfect tense, and pretty much every Data Sufficiency question fall into this category. These questions don’t have to be especially tricky to be difficult.
But when the GMAT takes a topic that people do have some familiarity with- basic algebra or subject-verb agreement, for example- the GMAT needs a way to complicate the problem, oftentimes by preying upon the simple mistakes we all make. This is exactly what I see with Critical Reasoning questions. We make illogical arguments in our daily lives and refute other people’s illogical arguments with illogical rebuttals. I went to Notre Dame and therefore know that the University of Southern California will not win a national championship in football this year. Why? Because I hate USC. Is this logic sound? Probably not. My liking for USC’s football team doesn’t mean much when it comes to whether or not they will be successful this year. In the real world, we look for whether a fellow football fan likes or dislikes our favorite team before deciding whether they make a good argument. We look for a (D) or an (R) at the bottom of CSPAN before deciding whether a politician sounds intelligent. But if we can ignore these irrelevant items and focus on the point an argument is trying to make, we will be much more likely to spot bad answer choices in Critical Reasoning arguments and be able to quickly eliminate them on the GMAT. Read more
Comparing Things in GMATPrep Sentence Correction
I’ve got a really interesting GMATPrep problem for you today. Try it out (1 minute 15 seconds) and then we’ll talk about it!
* The striking differences between the semantic organization of Native American languages and that of European languages, in both grammar and vocabulary, have led scholars to think about the degree to which differences in language may be correlated with nonlinguistic differences.
(A) that of European languages, in both grammar and vocabulary, have
(B) that of European languages, including grammar and vocabulary, has
(C) those of European languages, which include grammar and vocabulary, have
(D) those of European languages, in grammar as well as vocabulary, has
(E) those of European languages, both in grammar and vocabulary, has
I chose this problem because I wanted to remind myself (and you!) of something that I’ve been forgetting lately. We’ve been focusing a lot on meaning and very long underlines “ sentences in which it’s not so easy to find splits or differences among the answer choices. I wanted to remind myself that sometimes they do give us some easier clues to figure out what’s going on as long as we’re paying attention to the right things.
The process that we’re going to discuss below is my first, ideal process “ if I can use this method, I will. On the more convoluted sentences “ in particular, those with serious meaning issues, which often tend to have large chunks of the sentence changing “ well, okay, I’ll use the techniques that we’ve discussed in other articles. But those techniques are harder to execute and tend to take longer, so I want to use the most streamlined process whenever I can. Read more
GMAT Grammar in Real Life: No Hawking, No Loitering, No Keep Fit
My friend Zev Lowe (ESADE MBA ’09) took this photo in Kumasi, Ghana.
Did the sign make you laugh? Why would many speakers of English find it amusing?
Probably because it violates the principle of grammatical parallelism, thus creating unintentional hilarity.
We learn about parallelism in class 3 of our 9-session GMAT class. In short, parallelism is (or should be) present in any construction that puts two or more things the same way.
CORRECT: The company balanced its budget, hired a new janitor, and laid off two executives who wouldn’t stop stealing staplers.
In this sentence, balanced, hired, and laid off are all past tense verbs, nicely arranged in a list with an “and” before the last item. (Note that the comma before the “and” is somewhat controversial in American English. The GMAT tends to use a comma before the last item in a list, but you are not tested on this issue.)