so verbal reasoning is one of the hardest subtests in the entire ucat you're expected to read these huge passages of text that look like they've been pulled straight out of a scientific journal or history textbook and what's worse is that you have less than 30 seconds to answer each question my name is emil and i scored in the 99th percentile on the ucat in 2020 and in this video i'll help you get through this absolutely cursed subtest this video is the first in my youcat crash course series sponsored by med entry and in this video i'll give a quick overview of the subtest share my general strategy my tips and tricks and go through some questions myself live on camera if you don't know what the verbal reasoning subtest is it's the first section of the ucat and you're expected to answer 44 questions on various passages of text in 21 minutes there are 11 passages of text in total and each passage comes with four questions that can either be reading comprehension type questions with free text answer options or true false can't tell questions on average you have approximately two minutes to answer all of the questions relevant to a specific passage but you don't have to follow this timing overall the verbal reasoning section tests your ability to read and understand and analyze difficult passages of text now let's talk about the general strategy i take for answering questions the first of which is just a general mindset on how i like to time verbal reasoning questions because the verbal reasoning subtest is so time pressured it's often unreasonable to expect yourself to get through all 44 questions and to answer them all with the same degree of accuracy it's important to know that not all of the questions in the subtest will be of the same difficulty so what i like to do is i like to go through the subtest in various stages in the first stage i'll try to answer around 32 out of the 44 questions and i'll take a little bit more time than necessary to answer these questions so that i can answer them with a relatively high degree of accuracy by giving myself more time to answer these questions i can make sure that i get the easier questions in the subtest right and i can skip three passages that i think are the hardest in the second pass i'll have around 12 or so questions left with maybe only four to five minutes so what i'll do is i'll go through these passages really quickly and try to make educated guesses so that i can get maybe 30 to 40 accuracy on these questions this mindset personally helped me a lot because it meant that i wasn't just rushing through all of the questions because i was so worried about finishing on time it meant i could spend a little bit more time on the questions that were easier get those marks and then make educated guesses on the remaining questions now when i go to answer questions the first part of my strategy is to have a very quick look at the passage when i look at the passage what i'm looking for is whether the passage is very thick and chunky or whether it's about something that looks very complicated and hard to digest if the passage is looking a bit too difficult what i'll do is i'll just flag and skip those questions and then come around to them when i'm making educated guesses at the end of the subtest when i find passages that i want to do the second part of my strategy is to start with the question the first thing i do here is i ask myself does this question look easy or hard what's the information that i need to gain from the passage to actually answer this question correctly sometimes at this stage i'll realize that the questions in this passage are really difficult or might require me to do a lot of working out to understand the answer so i might end up skipping that question as well as you can see a lot of my strategy is based around skipping questions that i think are too hard and not worth doing in the time i have available once i decide that i want to do a set of questions what i'll do is i'll read through the questions again to make sure that i understand what the question is asking me and what i'll need to look for in the passage if the question is a reading comprehension question i'll also have a look through the answer options to make sure i understand what the answer options are actually referring to from all of this i'm priming my brain before i even read the passage to know what i'm looking for and what information i'm trying to gain out of the passage to answer the question it might sound ridiculous but it's only after all of these steps that i actually start to read the passage properly after i know what the question is asking me i make sure to start reading the passage with a very strong intention of what i'm looking for a trap i think a lot of people fall into is that they scan for keywords and they absorb nothing from the passage and as a result with every question they feel more and more lost because they don't know what they're looking for what i try to do is i try to read paragraph by paragraph and then i try to understand and summarize each paragraph once i've finished reading it the idea here is that i want to read but i also want to have a very high retention of what i'm reading so that i can answer the following questions that will come up in the passage once i find the relevant information to answer the question i'll answer the question being really careful of any qualifiers like accept or false in the question stem and then i'll just pick my answer and move on as quickly as possible when i'm moving on to the next question in a set of four my aim is to remember the majority of the passage so that when i look at the question i know exactly where i need to find the information that i'm looking for if you build up this skill of retaining what you're reading then you'll actually be able to answer the next couple of questions in the set very very quickly because you know exactly where to look for the information or you might read the question and you might know the answer straight away as a result in these verbal reasoning sets it's okay to spend one to one and a half minutes doing the first question so that you can answer the second third and fourth questions in around 10 to 20 seconds each now i'll move on to talk about some tips and tricks i have for getting better and doing well in this subtest the first tip i have is to just take a really deep breath and to relax at the start of your subtest before the subtest starts you'll have a one minute block where you can sit and prepare yourself for the subtest this time is really important to take some deep breaths and to try and calm your nerves before you start the ucat because the verbal reasoning subtest is the first subtest in the ucat it's important that you start off strong and reduce the stress that you might be feeling the second tip i have is that it's so important to learn how to retain the information that you're reading there's no point reading through verbal reasoning passages if you don't remember anything that you've read and for every question you have to return to the passage and go through the information all over again just to keep on trying to understand the information doing this is what makes people lose so much time and lose so much accuracy because they're constantly rereading the paragraph and because they're running out of time they end up cutting their losses and just picking a bad answer anyway in practice start by reading passages with a lot more time than you would have in the ucat but focus on increasing your accuracy and retaining the information that's given to you in a passage as you get better and better at this skill try to reduce the amount of time you have to read this information and try to keep that high accuracy and high retention of the passive my third tip is to try and increase your reading speed by making small changes to increase your efficiency this can be things like starting reading from the second or third word of a sentence rather than from the very beginning and it can be also things like reducing the subvocalization that you do when you're reading if you don't know what sub-vocalization is i recommend you search it up on youtube and try and learn how to reduce it my fourth and fifth tip are ways you can practice more effectively to build up your skill of reading and retaining information one way of practicing i would highly recommend is reading through a paragraph of a passage covering it with your hand and then trying to recall in a couple of sentences exactly what that paragraph was about practicing this over time will mean that you automatically try and retain the information once you read paragraphs another useful practice technique you can use is once you finish the first question in a set have a look at the second question and then don't even look at the passage but try and remember exactly which paragraph of the passage you need to look at to find the information doing these things will help you build confidence in your own ability and your ability to know exactly where to find information when you see a question before i move on to doing some questions on camera i'd like to thank medentry for sponsoring this series med entry is the ucat preparation platform that i used when i was preparing for the ucat and i find that they have questions that are most similar to the actual test they have skills trainers a written guide an extensive question bank with thousands of questions and over 20 mock exams that you can use to prepare for the ucat so sign up using the link in the description down below to get 15 off their online or platinum packages so i've got the med entry verbal reasoning question bank up on the screen here and i'm going to go through some reading comprehension questions and just show you my general strategy on how i would answer these questions to try and get the answer right the majority of the time so the very first thing i do before even starting to answer the questions is just to decide whether i want to do these questions or not so just from having a very quick look at the passage here overall i see that it's about scientists biodiversity see the words by biodiversity agricultural expansion so i know that this passage is probably going to be about some sort of thing to do with climate change agricultural diversity etc so i know because of that i probably am okay with doing these passages because i tend to not mind these scientific passages and they tend to be okay with the content that they have then what i'll do is i'll have a look at the question and i'll also decide whether this seems like an easy question or a hard question to do and then i'll just have a look according to the passage conventional conversation that seems like something that's fairly easy to answer so then i'll decide yes in the test i probably would do this question this whole process would probably only take like five seconds but it's useful to get into the habit of doing that so that you do the easy questions or the ones that you're most likely to get correct first and you do them with the highest degree of accuracy rather than really wailing away and struggling with questions that are really hard so now i'll actually start to try to answer the question the first thing i'll do is read the question so i see according to the passage conventional conservation is heart surgery is insufficient for most species will need to be increased slightly must be complemented by deeper rooted change so now i know what i'm looking for is a discussion of what conventional conservation is and what that means in terms of the passage so now that i've primed my brain i'm going to start reading the passage with intention and while doing that i'm going to try and remember what i'm reading so from reading this first paragraph i know that it's not about conventional conservation but i do know that i'm going to make a mental note of the fact that it is about the background of climate change and conservation in the world at the moment so the second paragraph i also know is not necessarily about conventional conservation but i'm making a mental note that it is about how climate change and agriculture are changing biodiversity and what the issue is at present so now reading the third paragraph i see ensuring that this calming wave agricultural expansion doesn't lead to widespread diet biodiversity losses is going to require a big increase in conventional conservation so that's what we're talking about here um but it is probably going to require something more to so that's just does suggest that it's not going to be a it's not going to be um c and it's probably going to be d just from reading that sentence right there but i might continue to read just so i know for sure that it is d yeah so from reading this sentence here these existing approaches are similar to performing heart surgery very effective for the targeted species and habitats but not feasible for every species instead we need to tackle the underlying causes so yes that highly suggests that it must be complemented by deeper rooted change so with the second question which of the following assertions is best supported by the text the thing to note here is that because it's about assertions and best supported by the text this means that you can make a lot more inferences in this question and these things don't necessarily have to be 100 percent supported in the text or directly mentioned so reading through these answer options i'm going to think about where in the passage i'm looking for this information so with option a we see few fewer habitats would be at risk if conservation efforts were better funded i know this is in the second paragraph and it's right here partly this is because conservation is woefully underfunded but i also know from reading this third paragraph just then that it's not just about increasing funding so i think the answer is not going to be a with answer option b agriculture is a threat to habitats which is most likely to change for the better i know this is definitely not true this is in the second paragraph because they tell you that the need for new agricultural land is going to increase so b is definitely not going to be true c global population growth is inherently a bad trend for biodiversity this isn't necessarily supported by the uh by the passage but i know it's in here and as global populations grow and people become wealthier and consume more the need for new agricultural land is just going to increase so i know that it's probably not going to be c as well there will be 10 million square kilometers of new farmland by 2050. so here they tell you 10 million square kilometers i see 10 million here but this is just maybe as much so it's not will be 10 million square kilometers so from reading all of these i wasn't convinced by all of them but since it's which of the following assertions is best supported by the text i would think that a is most likely to be true because here it does tell you that conservation is woefully underfunded with this question though it's important to realize that this was much easier to do because i knew where to look for the information in the paragraph and i didn't have to scan from the top down for all of these questions because i actually knew where to look straight away this question is kind of a hard one the tone of the passage could be best described as and this again is really important why you get a general idea of what the passage is about and you see okay a hopeful piece a call for action a bleak outlook or a fearful warning i know i haven't read the last bit of the passage here so i'm just going to read that to try and get an idea of whether the tone changes there so here straight away i see that instead we need to tackle the underlying causes or conservation is not going to be able to cope that reads like a call to action and so therefore i'm going to think that the answer is b i could also eliminate all of these other options by thinking about how the passage as a whole doesn't necessarily use words that are like fearful or bleak so it's probably not going to be c or d and then it also isn't necessarily hopeful because they are talking about the consequences of loss of biodiversity which could occur this last question with which of the following statements would the author most likely agree again that means because it's most likely it doesn't have to be fully supported or directly written in the text you can make some inferences with these questions so here a climate change does not pose a threat to biodiversity this is going to be in the first paragraph here we know that things allows to get worth in the future with combination of habitat loss climate change and overexploitation it's about biodiversity so a is definitely not true b climate change is in the media more than the threat from agriculture this is most likely to be true because i see i remember seeing it in the second paragraph so climate change rightly gets a huge amount of coverage but for biodiversity the biggest threat actually comes from the destruction of natural habitats to make way for agriculture so i know the answer is most likely to be b in the real test i would just select this and move straight on because i know i don't want to waste time once i've already gotten the answer c farmers must change their approach that wasn't really mentioned at all in the paragraph there's nothing about farmers so no c is not collected likely to be true d humans should consume less than they currently do that again is mentioned here global populations grow people become wealthier and consume more but the author itself doesn't necessarily say that humans should consume less than they do so therefore i'm thinking the answer is definitely going to be b with these last few questions it's really important to highlight that it's easy to do these questions quickly and in the test i might have been able to do them in 10 or 15 seconds because i built a strong understanding of the passage in the first couple of questions so i've submitted my answers and as you can see we got all of those questions right which is excellent and i think that it's really important to remember that these are the general principles that will help you get the questions correct in the vast majority of verbal reasoning questions regardless of whether they're reading comprehension or true false can't tell if you found this video helpful please do hit the like button on this video and remember to subscribe so that you can get informed of all of the youcat crash course series coming up and remember to check out this playlist here with all of those videos