Kaplan RC

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THE BASIC PRINCIPLES OF READING COMPREHENSION
1.Be sensitive to issues of topic, scope, and author’s purpose and structure, and the author’s voice.
What does GMAT reading involve? Broadly stated, it involves reading to identify three general elements: topic and scope, the author’s purpose and passage structure, and the author’s voice. And all of these elements will normally be clear from a strategic reading of the first paragraph alone.

Topic( a subject of discussion or conversation) and scope(the area covered by a given activity or subject.)

As you work through the first few sentences, you need to determine the passage’s topic. If it’s a science passage, for example, ask yourself what branch of science it’s about. If it’s about astronomy, ask yourself what part of astronomy. If it’s about stars, then zero in on the passage’s topic: stars.
When it comes to determining the scope of a passage, you need to understand what we mean by scope. Think of scope as a narrowing of the topic. If the topic is industrial safety regulations, what narrower definition can we present that still describes all of the passage? Is there a comparison to another type of safety regulation? Is there a comparison between safety regulations in different historical eras? Is there an analysis of the regulations’ histories? Or is the passage concerned only with a small aspect of the regulations—the ones pertaining to pregnant workers, for example?

Notice the questions in the previous paragraph. They may not read well, but we left them that way for a reason. Those questions nicely illustrate the kind of thinking that you’ll need to do as you work through a passage on test day. Once you have the topic and narrowed down its scope, you’ve finished the first step in reading comprehension. But what then? You still don’t have a firm grasp of the passage.

Author’s purpose and structure

Almost every single GMAT reading comp question hinges on your ability to step back from the text and analyze why the author is writing in the first place and how she puts her text together. The GMAT demands that you figure out the author’s purpose and the passage structure, because that’s the best way for the test makers to test how you think about the prose you read. And thinking is always being tested, one way or another, on every GMAT question.

Now, it would be nice, not to mention helpful, if the authors of the reading passages came right out and announced why they are writing, what they have to say, and how they intend to accomplish their goal. No such luck. The prose that you will see on the GMAT, like most sophisticated writing, doesn’t reveal its secrets quite so explicitly. Authors always have a purpose, of course, and always have a structural plan for carrying out that purpose. What they don’t do is announce them, and that puts an extra burden on the reader—to analyze what’s stated, read between the lines, and make inferences.

Baldly laying out the why and how of a passage up front isn’t a hallmark of GMAT reading comp passages. And even more importantly, if ideas were blatantly laid out, the test makers couldn’t ask probing questions about them. So, in order to set up the questions—to test how we think about the prose we read—the GMAT uses passages in which authors hide or disguise their statement of purpose and challenge us to extract it. If you came across the following first sentence of a typical passage, could you identify the topic and scope?

Zeros

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The great migration of European intellectuals to the United States in the second quarter of the twentieth century prompted a transmutation in the character of western social thought.

First, what’s the topic? The migration of European intellectuals to the united states in the second quarter of the twentieth century. That’s clear. Second, what is the scope? How can we narrow the topic? Well, the passage looks as if it will discuss the effects of this migration on social thought.
So, using what we know about topic and scope, we can easily deduce why the author is writing. His purpose, we might say, is “to explore how the arrival of European eggheads changed western social thought”. And notice the implied structure of what will follow. Don’t you expect the author to first describe the migration westward and then explain what the transmutation was? There is a definite purpose and structure here; we just have to work a little harder at figuring them out than we’re used to doing. So, the author will never say, “here’s why I write.” But unless you figure out why the author is writing, you won’t be able to analyze why each piece—each paragraph and each detail—is there and how it’s being used.

Author’s voice

An important part of GMAT critical reading is distinguishing between factual assertions—things that you could go and look up—and opinions or interpretations. It’s the latter that GMAT reading comp passages are built on, and you should pay the most attention to them every step of the way. Let’s say that while reading a passage, you come upon a paragraph that reads:

The coral polyps secrete calceous exoskeletons, which cement themselves into an under layer of rock, while the algae deposit still more calcium carbonate, which reacts with sea salt to create an even tougher limestone layer.

You have to stop and say to yourself, “so what?” these are statements of fact. What’s the point? Why are you telling me that? And instead of getting all wrapped up in the facts, push yourself forward until the author explains why he’s writing on the topic of coral reef formation. What should grab your attention is the following sentence:

All of this accounts for the amazing renewability of coral reefs despite the endless erosion caused by wave activity.

Consider how different this sentence is from the first one. The phrase this accounts for should set off an alarm in your brain: that’s the author talking, saying, “I believe this to be proven cause and effect.” The same goes for the word amazing. It indicates the author’s personal interpretation. Your response to this sentence should be: great, now, how so? Where is your evidence? In other words, as an active reader, you are now demanding support for the author’s opinions. You are forcing the author to defend his view—to tell you just what accounts for the “amazing renewability of coral reefs.”

Attacking a passage is what critical reading is all about: stepping back from the sheer factual content, figuring out the author’s views on a topic and how she arrived at them, and looking for the evidence that must be provided. Always be on the lookout for sentences in which the author’s voice is coming through, and try to skip past the sentences that are purely factual or simply there for support.

As you identify the author’s viewpoints, be sure not to argue with the author. If your own personal understanding or view of the issue happens to be a bit different, keep it to your self. The questions are going to test your command of the author’s views, and you can only get in trouble by imposing your own opinions.

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2. Get the gist of each paragraph.

The paragraph is the main structural unit of any passage. After you’ve read the first paragraph of the passage carefully, you need only find the gist, or general purpose, of each succeeding paragraph and then relate each paragraph to the passage as a whole. To find the gist of each paragraph, ask yourself:

l. Why did the author include this paragraph?
2. What shift did the author have in mind when moving on to this paragraph?
3. What bearing does this paragraph have on the author’s main idea?

This process allows you to create a mental road map of the passage. When questions arise that require you to look back into the passage, having a roadmap will help you locate the place in the text that contains the answer. This will allow you to zero in on the relevant information quickly.

3. Look for the main idea

At this point I can hear some of you asking: hey, you haven’t mentioned the main idea yet. I thought that was crucial. Well, it is and it isn’t. If you get in the habit of reading the way we are describing, for purpose and structure, you can’t help but notice the author’s main idea.

The term main idea refers to a single thesis that the author may be trying to prove in the course of the passage. It’s always a personal interpretation, a strong authorial point of view that demands evidence. And in the end, it’s the main thought that the author wants you to come away with as you finish the passage.

Lincoln was the sixteenth president will never be a main idea on a GMAT reading comp passage. Count on it. But As president, Lincoln set uncomfortable precedents for the curtailing of civil liberties—now there’s a promising main idea. There is a statement that demands evidence (what precedents? Why were they uncomfortable?), and an entire 350 words passage might be used to try to prove it true.

4. Don’t obsess over details

What is more, there is certainly no need to memorize details. You always have the option of relocating details if a particular question requires you to do so. If you have a good sense of a passage’s structure and paragraph topics and your mental roadmap is clear, then you should have no problem navigating back through the text when the need arises.

Typical reading comp question types

1. Global questions

A global question asks us to recognize the author’s overall intentions, ideas, or passage structure. It is really a question whose scope is the entire passage. In general, any answer choice that grabs onto a small detail, or zeroes in on the content of only one paragraph, will be wrong for a Global question. Often, scanning the verbs in a Global question’s answer agree with the author’s tone and structure of the passage, while the wrong choices will be too broad or narrow in scope or inconsistent with the author’s tone. You’ll often find Global questions at the beginning of question sets, and often one of the wrong choices will play on some side issue discussed at the tail end of the passage.

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Main idea and primary purpose questions

The two main types of global questions are main idea and primary purpose questions. Main idea and purpose are inextricably linked, because the author’s purpose is to convey his or her main idea. The format for these question types are pretty self-evident:

. Which one of following best expresses the main idea of the passage?
. The author’s primary purpose is to …

Structure questions

Another type of Global question asks you to recognize a passage’s overall structure. Here’s what this type of question might look like:

. Which of the following best describes the organization of the passage?

Answer choices to this kind of global question are usually worded very generally; they force you to recognize the broad layout of the passage, as opposed to the specific content. For example, here are three possible ways that a passage could be organized:

l. A hypothesis is stated and then analyzed.
2. A proposal is evaluated and alternatives are explored.
3. A viewpoint is set forth and then subsequently defended.

When choosing from among these choices, ask yourself: was there a hypothesis here? Was there an evaluation of a proposal or a defense of a viewpoint? These terms might all seem similar, but, in fact, they are very different. Learn to recognize the difference between a proposal, a viewpoint, and so on. Try to keep an eye on what the author is doing, as viewpoint, and so on. Try to keep an eye on what the author is doing, as well as what the author is saying, and you will have an easier time with this type of question.

2. Inference questions

Inference questions, as you can easily guess, concern inferences arising from the passage. An inference is something that is almost certainly true, based on the passage, but that is contained between the lines. The answer is something that the author strongly implies or hints at but does not state explicitly. Inference questions ask about large points or small.

Extracting valid inferences from reading comp passages requires the ability to recognize that information in the passage can be expressed in different ways. The ability to bridge the gap between the way information is presented in the passage and the way it’s presented in the correct answer choice is vital.

In fact, inference questions often boil down to an exercise translation.

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Regular inference questions

The most common type of inference question simply asks what can be inferred from the passage but it can do so in a variety of different ways:

. It can be inferred from the passage that…
. The passage/author suggests that …
. The passage/author implies that…
. The passage supports which one of the following statements regarding…


Agreement questions
Another common form of inference question is one that asks you to find a statement that the author (or some character or group mentioned in the passage) would agree with. The question stem will usually provide a hint about where in the passage the answer can be found:

. With which one of the following statements…would the author most likely agree?

You need to have a good handle on the author’s point of view or position in order to infer what the author would think about a particular situation or a new premise. Just remember to choose an answer that stays within the scope and tone of the passage. Also, remember that anything that seems to contradict any of the author’s ideas will almost certainly be wrong.

3. Logic questions

Logic question ask about why the author does something—cites a source, brings up a detail, puts one paragraph before another, and so forth. Answer choices that discuss the actual content or a detail will be wrong for these questions.

Logic question will look like this

. The author refers to mentions…primarily/most probably in order to…
. Which of the following best describes the relationship of the …paragraph to the rest of the passage?

Just be careful with line references in logic questions—they will be bring you to the right area, but usually the actual answer will be found in the lines immediately before or after the referenced line.

4. Explicit detail questions

The fourth major type of reading comp questions is the explicit detail question. As the name implies, an explicit detail question is one whose answer can be pinpointed in the text. It’s fairly simple to identify an explicit detail question from its stem:

. According to the passage/author…
. The author states that…
. The author mentions which one of the following as…

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Often, these questions provide very direct clues about where an answer may be found, such as line references or some text that links up with the passage structure.

You may recall that we advised you to skim over details in reading comp passages and to focus on the topic, scope, and purpose. But now here is a question type that’s specifically concerned with details, so what’s deal? The fact is, most of the details that appear in a typical passage aren’t tested in the questions. Of the few that are, you will either:

. Remember them from your reading
. Be given a line reference to bring you right to them; or
. Simply have to find them on your own in order to track down the answer.

If that’s the case—if your mental roadmap and understanding of the purpose of each paragraph are both clear in your mind—it shouldn’t take long to locate the relevant detail and then choose an answer. Despite this question type, the winning strategy is still to note the purpose of details in each paragraph’s argument but not to attempt to memorize the details themselves.

The four-step method for reading comp

1. Attack the opening paragraph

Be an active reader. This means thinking about what you are reading; paraphrasing the complicated parts; determining the topic, scope, the author’s purpose and passage structure, and author’s voice, and asking yourself questions about the passage.

2. Create a mental road map

Try labeling each paragraph so you know what’s covered and how it fits into the overall structure of the passage. This will help you get a fix on the passage as a whole, and it will help you locate specific details later on.

3. Stop to sum up

Before answering the questions, take a few seconds to summarize your mental road map.

4. Attack the questions

Answer the questions based on your mental road map of the passage.