hi how is the preparation? I too spent most of the prep time on SC. I hope the following sharing would be helpful. For your first question, usually I am not confident enough to pick out the first answer directly, even if it reads very smooth. This is especially true during the actual exam, when many of the SC questions looked unfamiliar, plus I was nervous. For your second question, I guess different ppl have different answers. For me it's usually a hybrid approach.I will identify the awkward expressions by the first quick reading. In the PREP and the exam this can usually reduce the options to below 3. Then I compare the difference of the remaining options and think about what grammar rule shall be applied, parrallel, comparison or agreement. If I feel so inconfident I may still go back to the options I filtered out before, but in that case the chance of getting the right answer is anyway not very high. The above applies more for long sentences with a lot of clauses and phrases. Reading the sentence can be particularly helpful because the clauses are usually ordered in very different manner, some obviously distorb the meaning while some appears very ineffective or confusing, based on which you can filter out quite some options. I feel the reason why I rely very much on reading is because I'm still not sensitive enough to all the grammar points. For things that I have struggled with (like as clause) or things that are too obvious (like between...and...), I may straightly look for the right pattern in the answers without reading them. I guess ultimately what is best for you depends on which can help you to quickly eliminate options. For me after completing OG11, summarizing it and revising the questions I did wrongly for a few times, I became quite sensitive to some grammar mistakes. But I'm far from mastering all aspects of the GMAT grammar. That is why I heavily rely on the feeling of "awkwardness" when doing SC questions. I do quite some readings during and after work, I guess that helps a lot with building the 'feeling'. |