I’ve got a fascinating little GMATPrep problem for you today. Try it out (1 minute 15 seconds) and then we’ll talk about it!

*  As the honeybee’s stinger is heavily barbed, staying where it is inserted, this results in the act of stinging causing the bee to sustain a fatal injury.

 

(A) As the honeybee’s stinger is heavily barbed, staying where it is inserted, this results in the act of stinging causing

(B) As the heavily barbed stinger of the honeybee stays where it is inserted, with the result that the act of stinging causes

(C) The honeybee’s stinger, heavily barbed and staying where it is inserted, results in the fact that the act of stinging causes

(D) The heavily barbed stinger of the honeybee stays where it is inserted, and results in the act of stinging causing

(E) The honeybee’s stinger is heavily barbed and stays where it is inserted, with the result that the act of stinging causes

I chose this problem because it addresses multiple tricky issues that are perhaps easy to hear “ if you have built a good GMAT ear “ but are difficult to explain or articulate. Anything that’s difficult to explain or articulate to yourself is harder to remember. It’s also easier for us to be fooled by our ears on such sentences.

Okay, let’s talk about the problem. My first reaction to the original sentence was: nope, that’s definitely wrong. Now, when the clock is actually ticking and I’m that confident, I don’t bother to try to explain to myself why, exactly, this one is wrong. I just cross off A and look for others that I can cross off for the same reasons I crossed off A.

Here, though, I hit a snag. When I went to the cross off anything else with the same mistake step there wasn’t a single word or location in the sentence on which I could concentrate.
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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.

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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

We’ve talked a lot about meaning in sentence correction recently and I’ve got another problem along that same theme for you. The problem I chose comes from the new GMATPrep 2.0 (warning: you may not want to read the explanation until after you’ve used the new software yourself, just in case you see the same problem!). This one actually did also show up in the old version of GMATPrep, but I saw it years ago and forgot about it. When I saw it during my 2.0 test last week, I had the same reaction that I did when I first saw the problem about 5 years ago: I can’t believe they actually did that!

Here’s the problem. Set your timer for 1 minute 15 seconds and go for it!

* As the former chair of the planning board for 18 consecutive years and a board member for 28 years, Joan Philkill attended more than 400 meetings and reviewed more than 700 rezoning applications.

(A) As the former
(B) The former
(C) Former
(D) She was
(E) As the

Short underline “ should be easy right? I received this question as #14 on my test and I got the first 13 questions right. That should give you an idea of the difficulty level. : )
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We’ve been examining the issues of modifiers and meaning quite a bit lately because these topics are both so important on the GMAT. I’ve got another one for you today.This problem is from GMATPrep. Set your timer for 1 minute 15 seconds and go for it!

* “Recently documented examples of neurogenesis, the production of new brain cells, include the brain growing in mice when placed in a stimulating environment or neurons increasing in canaries that learn new songs.
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Modifiers have always been commonly tested on the GMAT and emphasis on meaning has increased recently. In addition, these two areas can often be quite tricky “ it’s hard to articulate exactly what the issues are sometimes. So let’s try talking one through. This problem is from GMATPrep. Set your timer for 1 minute 15 seconds and go for it!

*  “Initiated five centuries after Europeans arrived in the New World on Columbus Day 1992, Project SETI pledged a $100 million investment in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

(A) Initiated five centuries after Europeans arrived in the New World on Columbus Day 1992, Project SETI pledged a $100 million investment in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

(B) Initiated on Columbus Day 1992, five centuries after Europeans arrived in the New World, a $100 million investment in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence was pledged by Project SETI.

(C) Initiated on Columbus Day 1992, five centuries after Europeans arrived in the New World, Project SETI pledged a $100 million investment in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

(D) Pledging a $100 million investment in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, the initiation of Project SETI five centuries after Europeans arrived in the New World on Columbus Day 1992.

(E) Pledging a $100 million investment in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence five centuries after Europeans arrived in the New World, on Columbus Day 1992, the initiation of Project SETI took place.

As we discuss this problem, I really want you to think about how to articulate why something is incorrect (or correct). Pretend you’re the teacher and you have to explain it to your students. Also, I’m going to give us a bit of a handicap. You aren’t allowed to use this reason: It changes the original meaning of the sentence.

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Last week, I wrote about meaning issues in sentence correction, and there’s more to say “ so here’s part two of this topic. We’ll keep going till we don’t have anything else to discuss!

First and foremost, I want to address something that I keep seeing everywhere “ on the forums, in the comments sections of my articles and blog posts, and so on. People keep saying, But how are we going to study now? Are you going to publish a new book? What can we do? I’m taking the test soon!

I’m going to reiterate what I’ve been saying (and forgive me if you already heard this and got the message!): meaning issues have always existed, and there is plenty of existing material from which to study. We just didn’t concentrate as much on meaning before, because we were able to do more simply with grammar. They aren’t putting totally new kinds of SC questions out there “ they’re just increasing the proportion of an already-existing issue.

Now, because in the old days, the proportion was skewed more towards pure grammar, we were often able to get away with just studying grammar and not worrying so much about meaning. We can’t get away with that now “ we have to study the meaning as well. Read more

Since the GMAT Prep summit, we have been covering what the changes that were described there mean based on what Larry Rudner, GMAC vice president of research and development and chief psychometrician, has told us. Now he has written an official response, which we have re-posted below.  Hopefully this will further clarify what those differences consist of and how you can study for the GMAT successfully. You can find the original posting here.

Idioms, Sentence Correction, and the GMAT Exam

Recently there has been some discussion and questioning about the role and place of idioms and sentence correction as they apply to the skills tested in the GMAT exam.  Much of what has been written has been well reasoned but some of what has been written is only partially accurate or reflects some misconceptions. With this posting I hope to put these two important pieces of the GMAT exam in their proper place within the context of what the exam measures and how.

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In this table, we discuss a number of Sentence Correction problems from the OG12. Certain answer choices have “meaning” issues; we list the answer choice letters and provide a brief discussion of the issues involved. Note that this list is not comprehensive and is still in fairly raw form; there are additional problems and answer choices that could also contain meaning issues, and it’s possible that reasonable people will disagree with some of the things on this list (though we tried to include only the ones that we thought were most straightforward). Read more

Recently, we heard from GMAC that it has been testing meaning more often in sentence correction than it used to (this increase started years ago). In the last couple of days, I’ve gone through the first 100 problems in the Official Guide 12^th Edition (OG12) so that we can discuss some of these issues.

I’ve categorized these meaning issues into three broad categories; in this article, I’m going to call out some particular examples and discuss what’s going on with each. You can then use these examples to help you continue to study different problems. We’ve also put together a list of specific problems and answer choices that deal with these meaning issues. You can find that list here. Finally, pay attention to the explanation wording “ if it mentions that something changes the meaning or is ambiguous then you know a meaning issue is going on in that problem!

Before we dive in, I have to say that I was surprised while researching this “ turns out that there are even more meaning-based questions than I would have thought (which is why I’ve only gotten through the first 100 OG questions rather than all of them by deadline time). In the OG, a lot of the answer choices that test meaning also have other grammatical issues, so we can often get away with ignoring the meaning and focusing on the grammar.

My guess is that GMAC has been working hard to make us deal with the meaning more by not giving us a grammar out on so many answer choices (on the real test). If you’ve been ignoring the meaning aspect when you see that there’s a more pure grammar reason for getting rid of an answer stop doing that. When studying, pay attention to every possible reason for an elimination. Seek out these meaning issues and study them. Read more