Transcript for:
Mastering GMAT Verbal Strategies

[Music] hi everyone good morning good evening depending where you are i'm marty murray i'm chief curriculum and content officer for target test prep and i spend a lot of time working on verbal today we're going to be talking about how to master gmat verbal and i could i want to preface this by saying that the preparing and effective preparation is really going to get you to your score goal no matter where you started from i learned that myself tell you a funny thing when i started preparing for the gmat i had no idea that scoring 800 on the test was supposed to be so hard i saw other instructors who had done it so i just prepared i did what everybody does i learned the best preparation methods end up scoring 800 on the gmat so effective preparation will take you wherever you want to go on this test and before we start i want to say that as you probably know over the past couple of months more than four million refugees have read that have fled the ukraine and millions of people that are living in ukraine have been uh displaced so our session today is going to benefit several charities doing really important work right now to help ukrainian refugees so please donate to the fundraiser if you can any amount will help and uh you know we really appreciate it if you could help with this cause because it's super important uh also regarding this particular session at intervals during the session we're going to be giving out gmat club test subscriptions and uh 24 10 day target test prep subscriptions so if you are interested in having the great gmat club test or access to our target test prep course for 10 days to brush up on your gmat skills then stick around for these uh the prizes we'll be doing them after each segment we'll be starting with sentence correction moving to critical reasoning and wrapping up with reading comprehension and uh as we do each we're gonna give away those prizes uh today so what are we gonna do today we're all here we have three hours to work with so the idea for today is it's just going to be a master class okay so i'm sort of assuming that you know some of the basics if you don't we'll cover them a little bit you'll understand and you also get a sense of what you need to learn to master gmat verbal and on the other at the same time we're going to be doing this sort of from an expert perspective we're going to see how an expert would handle a lot of these questions we're going to assume that you know some of these uh you know some of these key terms some of the modifier things some of the you know the concepts for critical reasoning those type of things and we're going to hit these um we're going to hit these questions and look at them with an expert i look at you know really break these things down and analyze them and i've also picked the questions with the intention of each one has a specific thing we can learn from it okay so it's something that you might not see somewhere else you know something that you almost might uh disagree with some of the rumors you've heard about you might verbal we're going to so we're going to look at these questions with the eye like well what can what key thing can we take away from each one to really get a chance to to master gmat verbal and take our scores to the next level so with that in mind let's let's hit it okay so we're going to begin by just talking in general is a reminder of what gmat verbal is and you know you might get the impression that gmat verbal is a grammar test or you might be get the impression that gmat verbal is an english test or a reading test but when we if we had to call gmat verbal one thing we call gmat verbal a fairly sophisticated logic game okay it's a logic game and it's key to understand that because a lot of the things we hear about how to prepare or you know what gmod verbal is don't really focus on this idea and it's easy to get the sense like i said that gmf rubble is maybe a grammar you know just if i learn enough grammar rules i'll get this i'll rock a team every whole or if i learn a lot of uh patterns for critical reasoning uh you know i can just if i know the right patterns i'll get critical reasoning questions right or if i know keywords for rc i'm going to get all the rc questions right this is a misconception gmr verbal is a logic game okay so what we really have to be prepared to do is use logic to get these questions correct so when you're preparing let that color what you do if you realize that you're preparing for a logic game then you're going to prepare effectively because you're going to use logic through everything you're doing you're going to have in mind am i using logic am i learning to use logic am i improving my use of logic am i getting better at this logic game and if you prepare that way then you're going to be preparing in a way that's going to get you to your scoreboard so let's talk a little bit more about how the moves we can do make for winning this game okay uh the first move is to learn rules and concepts true it is a logic game but like any game but we need to this game requires us to learn the rules if we don't know the rules and we don't know the concepts it's going to be pretty hard to play the game that said the rules and concepts are not the game right it's again it's a logic game so it's not a memorization game yes we want to memorize a few rules for the game but it's not a memorization game it's you know and there's plenty of people that know all the rules that are not hitting their score goal in gmat verbal so learning the rules and concepts is super important but it's not the entire thing the second thing we want to do is learn strategies and there's a lot of reasons why we learn strategies and we're going to talk about this more as we go through this session but you know if we not only are we going to learn rules and concepts we want to learn how to apply the rules and concepts so certainly we're going to learn strategies that allow us to effectively apply these rules and concepts as we go through the gmat verbal section right the strategies are going to be key if we have good strategies we're going to be ready to rock and the third thing and this is really important too is practicing effectively okay and and when the big the big part of this is the effectively part because we can all answer a thousand two thousand verbal questions and the question is is that practice gonna get us to our scoreboard right are we gonna practice in an effective way and we'll talk about how to practice effectively as we go through here but we definitely have to practice effectively and and the more we know about how to do this the more we're going to know what effective practice is so i'm going to discuss practicing at the end but we definitely have to keep in mind that practicing effectively is going to be a huge part of that learning rules and concepts is great learning strategies is great and then practicing effectively is what's going to lock it in for us so let's start by hitting sc i picked these sc questions but the idea as i said each one is going to show us something something interesting something you might not have seen something that might disagree a little bit with what you've heard and we're going to learn we're going to start getting really into the expert mind you know the mind of an expert in sentence correction okay so let's let's uh let's go go back to our foundation of how to master sentence question before we get these questions and you know this is starting to resemble some of the things we just talked about so we definitely want to learn sentence correction rules and concepts and this is really maybe the section where learning rules and concepts is the most important because there are so many sentence correction rules and concepts that we need to know if we're going to do this effectively i mean if you didn't even know at all how a sentence works it would be pretty hard to analyze a sentence and see whether it works right so we definitely need some rules and concepts but i'm here to tell you that it's not as hard to remember these rules and concepts as you might think and the reason is that the rules and concepts are mostly logic based right so we're learning sentence correction rules and concepts so many people say to me i see it all the time in the target test prep chat they say you know the gmat is required you know for the gmat it seems as if i have to know so many gmat sentence correction rules and concept and how am i going to remember all these you know this is crazy i start forgetting them well here's the deal if you learn the logic of them then it's not going to be as hard to remember them for instance the word everyone is always a singular subject and if you just memorize that uh you'll probably remember it but it's much easier to remember if you uh if you say well wait every one it's one person so one is naturally a singular subject another rule is that if they're commas around a modifier it's non-restrictive it's called a non-essential modifier well we could memorize that but we can also take it to the next level and say well gee if commas are kind of like parentheses so naturally if you put commas around it it kind of takes it out of the sentence so that kind of indicates that it's a non-essential modifier so this is logical you know most of the rules and sentence correction are logic based why does a modifier have to be close what it modifies because otherwise you can't tell what it modifies right why does a pronoun have to have the same number as the noun it refers to because that's the way you can tell what it refers to so all these things are all very logical or most of them 90 or 95 are very logical so it helps us really to remember these sentence correction rules and concepts if we see the logic the second part of sentence correction and this is this is a this is interesting for all of us it's to learn to read sentences literally and determine whether they convey meanings that make sense and you know this is different from how you read uh a sentence anywhere else because normally no matter where a sentence is we want to try to read and understand what the author meant you know if somebody's writing an email to us i don't know a client or a co-worker or a friend we certainly want to know what that person meant not necessarily what their sentence meant if we read it literally you know that would be pretty interesting some of the time because we don't all speak perfect damage and so if we read everything literally uh it wouldn't work out but on the gmat we have to change it up we have to read all our sentences literally and this is something you have to get used to right you're saying if i read this literally what does it mean right and this is huge and we don't do it anywhere else you know i mean if you unless you're an editor somewhere maybe but you get what i'm saying we read these sentences literally and determine whether they convey meanings that make sense okay does this sentence say something that makes sense so you know once again gmat sentence correction is not just about rules and concepts it's also about just understanding whether the sentence conveys a meaning that makes sense and there's so many ways they don't make sense and there's so many little tricks so there's no way to memorize them all what we want to do is just get used to reading what you know reading it literally and turning away if you read this this this this is saying that like you know the monkey was walking the dog that's i don't think that's what the uh the sentence was meant to say or this says i don't know the dog is wearing a speedo if you've seen that in the target i don't think that's what this writer meant to say it doesn't make sense so finally to master sentence correction we practice to develop skill and noticing issues in sentence versions okay so you know this is what we're learning to see we're learning to notice so we have to practice doing this right so once we learn the rules and learn to read sentences literally yeah so much of this is just practicing to notice what's going on okay what is going on something is an issue you know you see like wait a minute and you start off blind you know we all we start off blind we read two sentence versions they all i mean in the beginning when you do this whoa they all look the same to me you don't even we don't even notice the issues but as we practice it starts to come into focus and then you know after you've answered i don't know the first 50 sentence correction questions you start going you know what this looks funny something's going on here and then comes the second thing we're practicing is articulating exactly why the choices are incorrect or correct and i mean exactly this is the key thing because you know you know how it goes well i don't like this sensor it sounds funny to me or uh you know i don't know there's something about this it seems a little off well this is a fairly sophisticated logic game so saying that something seems a little off is probably not going to get us to the correct answer you know we have to learn to articulate exactly so we're looking to go the meaning conveyed by this sentence is nonsensical because this modifier is telling us that the dog is in the speedo okay so now you've nailed what sentence correction is and if you're using the target test prep course and you've read our explanations you'll see you know how to how to exactly do this and you don't you know those og explanations don't do that but you know if you see a really solid explanation that's what you have to learn basically your goal and when you're practicing at c is to learn to come up with those kind of explanations yourself you want to become the explainer okay so that's we're going to be talking about too is becoming an explainer of sc questions so we're going to hit some now and learn to do this i see a few questions coming in so let me see what's going on let's see okay you're stuck in the 30s we are going to get you higher okay we're going to get you we're going to break you out because we're gonna take you to an expert level today okay let's see if there's any other some specific stuff you know guys if you have super specific questions maybe you can um maybe you can uh yeah you know hit me on the ttp chat or email me for the super specific questions uh because we're gonna have we're gonna we have so much to do today but uh if basically if you want to get your score higher yeah if someone said if i want to get a 31 do i need to get 700 level questions correct uh maybe a couple i don't know maybe some of the easier 700 level ones you can't miss many verbal questions and get a 30 score you know it's not like quant we have to get a lot of questions correct so let's now hit a few questions and start seeing how we can do this at an expert level and we'll start with this one if you know this question i'm warning you i changed the choices around so let's give it a couple minutes on this everybody uh and if you please share your answers in the chat but do it just give everybody a couple minutes to look at the uh the question without any bias so please hold off on sharing your choices until we get a couple minutes yeah hold on just hold up let everybody do this on their own on his or her own i should say to be grammatically correct um but anyway you know what i'm saying okay we have a few different choices here and let's discuss this question so how we're going to handle this the first thing we're going to do is read the entire sentence the original version so it says the british sociologist and activist barbara wooten once noticed as humorous example of income mal distribution that there was an elephant giving rides to children at the web snake zoo and it earned exactly what she earned as director of adult education for one okay so that's pretty interesting the first thing i notice about this sentence is there are absolutely no grammatical errors and that's a lot of the point of this question that's why i'm bringing this up because we can learn all the grammar rules in the world and not get this correct but there are some rules we need to know and there's some things we can do so let's start we and one of them is by uh one thing we need to do is keep in mind the uh the non-underlying portion of the sentence so let's read these choices and consider them in the context of the non-underlying portion of the sentence and see what they mean because look at this a there was that there was an elephant giving rise to the children at the whips nade zoo and it earned there's absolutely nothing wrong with that right nothing wrong with it so how are we going to figure out what to do here we have to keep in mind the non-underlying portion of the sentence so what does it say the british sociologists and activists once noted as a humorous example of income mal distribution that there was an elephant giving rise to the children at the whip snake zoo is the fact that there was an elephant giving rides to children an example of income mal distribution no so a isn't logical okay so there's one issue with a so this is not an example of income mal distribution the fact that there is an elephant giving rise where is the income now distribution would have to show that income something is wrong and it doesn't say that secondly this is a you know a funny rule but it says that there was an elephant and it earned this is a poor connection okay we discussed this a little bit in the target test prep course a sentence should be and should be connected the ideas should be connected so what's happening here is this is saying that the british sociologist noted that there's a human example of income now distribution which is supposedly this first part and then we have this other part of the sentence and it earned see that it's not really and it earned exactly what she earned who is saying that it's just another clause tacked on this is a fairly sophisticated thing to see right but this is a fairly sophisticated test so if we want to rock sd we need to see little things like that is that clear to everybody like barbus wooten noted this that there was an elephant but this second part of the sentence is not well connected to it and it earned so who is saying she noted that there was an elephant giving rides and by the way it earned something and okay great so as the writer why would the writers say these two separate ideas without connect connecting it doesn't make sense okay there's another thing we can notice here that this this particular version has a particular meaning and a lot of people talk about in sentence question that the original version the original intended meaning should show up in the correct answer but does this does this mean make sense no right so there's no way this is going to show up in the correct answer okay so a is out and we're not going to carry the intended mean yeah i mean clause the second clause someone's asking isn't the clause to an example the the second clause is actually it earned exactly what she earned that would be sort of the fact that an elephant earned what she earned would be an example of income mal distribution but that that we need that to connect this to her okay we need to that so there's no that here this is just and earn this is a separate idea this is not what she said if you want to say what someone said you need that okay so like in e here we have a second that okay let's go to choice b this isn't the hardest question ever but you know what what is hard is you know a lot of people got this correct but what is hard is analyzing it okay so let's talk about that someone just mentioned what level is this question i think it's a 600 level question or a low 600 level question anyway it's not particularly hard but here's the deal did how many of you saw that the second clause did not work with the first one right if you didn't see that then you could say well this is an easy question i can get it right but when you're practicing you want to go through every single sentence correction choice and understand exactly what we see articulate exactly why it's incorrect so how cool is that that even though this is a fairly easy question we can learn so much from it and that's what you want to do when you're practicing sounds crushing okay and that's the purpose of this master class is to take things to show you how to take things up a level so if you're like well why am i scoring you know i don't know i can't my score's not going up because you know you're you how or how can i get my score to go up you can do it by practicing in this way by articulating exactly what's going on in every choice if you get this question correct but you didn't know that part about the clause well you haven't you're not an expert yeah i can get it right you might you know if you get it down to the last two choices and guess and i get this all the time you know people tell me i get down to the last few choices and i kind of guess well if you get down to the last two choices and kind of guess you're gonna get fifty percent correct theoretically right so you're already winning so the fact that you got a question correct does not mean that you're ready to score high on g measurable what you wanna be able to do is see what we just saw let's go to b okay the british sociologist and activist barbud once noted at a humorous income example of income attribution that the elephant okay giving rise to children had been earning exactly what she earned now we do have an example of a humorous example of income mal distribution because b does work with this beginning part of the sentence by saying that the elephant had been earning exactly what she earned i'm going to keep this one we're going to get rid of the easy odds first okay let's get rid of the easy outs first let's look at c uh uh barbara wooten once known as humorous example of income out of distribution that the elephant that gave rise of children at the whip snake zoo was earning exactly what she earned as director of adult education that makes sense too let's keep seeing it's not an easy out d the barbara wooten was noticed at a human what's noted at his humorous example of income out of distribution the elephant do you see what's going on here it's nice and concise the elephant that gave rise to children at the whips in a zoo and was ernie it's certainly parallel the elephant that gave rides and was earning is parallel it's all perfect it's grammatically correct but an elephant is not an example of income now distribution so d is an easy out e uh she noted the elephant giving rise to children at the whip snake zoo is a humorous example and that had earned the same thing she was earning look what this sentence did it broke up the elephant and the this certainly the fact that the elephant earned exactly what she earned on the end of sea i mean the end of it rather it's certainly a reason a humorous example of uh income mal distribution but you know we broke it up we broke up she noted the elephant as a humorous example and that had earned wasn't she giving one example of one thing yes he is out all meaning notice once again grammatically perfect notice how sophisticated we're being about this though right like we're not just saying this choice is parallel so it's correct or this is grammatically correct so it's correct we're analyzing carefully the meaning and we're articulating exactly why these choices are wrong so now let's go back to b and c c says that the element she noted as a humorous example of income now distribution that the elephant that gave rise to children so this is a restricted modifier this is a restrictive modifier i lost my pen uh you know the ellis so this is a particular elephant the elephant that gave rise and this one is the elephant giving rides to children notice what's going on here this is saying the elephant the elephant is there one elephant on the planet she noted that the elephant giving rise to children so this elephant doesn't always give rise to children which element are we talking about a non-restrictive modifier set off by these commas it doesn't restrict which uh which elephant we're talking about so if we know our modifier rules and our concepts notice that wasn't enough just to know the rules and concepts because okay fine there's nothing grammatically wrong with this the modifier is not misplaced it's fine for an elephant to give rides you know i mean unless you disagree with having elephants do anything like that but you know what i'm saying it's it's logical that an elephant could give rides to children at the whip sneezu so that modifier is not misplaced there's nothing blatantly wrong but if you know what a restrictive modifier and a non-restricted modifier does you say the meaning is off this okay so we have the elephant is giving and when it's giving rise and it had been earned well that doesn't make sense there's not the elephant so let's look and see again the elephant that gave rise this is restrictive as we said so this particular elephant that gave rise was earning exactly what she earned as director of adult education in london so we can see out of the infamous two last two choices that c is our correct answer right here the elephant that gave rods and wizarding and was ernie right what did we do we were fairly sophisticated about this we took an easy question and we just spent 10 minutes on it and this is what you need to do in your practice i've seen people that blow through the questions they get eighty percent correct in a minute each and they're like well why am i not scoring 45 a verbal because yeah you can get 80 correct in a minute each but you can't get 100 correct and you're not learning by doing them in a minute each okay so what do you do instead get 100 correct or 95 correct get 20 correct in a row and spend 5 minutes each or 10 minutes each analyze them the way we just did this is how you take your verbal score to the next level by being able to articulate exactly what's going on okay i got a bunch of questions coming in so let's see what's going on someone asked if uh target chess you know if anybody any third party can write questions as well as um as a gmat yes the answer is yes the people at the gmat are people the people at a third party company are also people so yeah people can do what people do and by the way uh atari test prep you know people say well the the gmat spends thousands of dollars on every question at target chess but we just wrote a bunch of new sentence correction questions we had the first person wrote them they were they were then workshop re-edited we put them in the course we saw the the statistics edit them again another person reviews them so we have a similar process to what goes on in the uh for the creation of real gmat questions and that's why our questions are pretty tight um let's see what else is going on does target test prep categorize the questions yes we do we categorize them by difficulty and even by type by uh by error type okay let's see we appreciate all the donations peeps okay someone asked me i mean had been earning does sort of works but sort of doesn't work she noted that the elephant giving rise at the zoo i mean had been earning it's not insanely incorrect okay yeah okay okay so let's continue on next question remember to hold off with your uh with your answers um until everybody gets a chance okay let's go through this one it's a tricky question it's a 700 level question so if you thought it was a 500 level question you probably got it incorrect but before we do that i want to just wrap up one thing that a couple people asked about uh in the past one and this question here they said well isn't someone's this modifier with commas around it okay in b giving rise it it's a non-essential modifier you know there's a few things we could learn about this and i'm not going to go into all of them right now but it does modify both the subject and the verb of the clause so that the elephant giving rise to the children had been earning there's another issue with it uh but it's not it's not you know the main issue with this with this is it's just non-essential it doesn't it doesn't tell us which elephant we're talking about because it's separated by these two commas okay so it doesn't say which elephant we're talking about just says the elephant giving rise to children giving rise to children is just telling us a little more about what's going on because it's between commas it's not modifying it's not specifying which elephant although it is modifying the elephant in a way if but you need to learn if you don't get that you need to learn about your present participial phrases okay let's move back to this question okay number one step read the original version over 75 of the energy produced in france derives from nuclear power while in germany it is just over 33 okay this one might be one of our easy outs i see a pronoun in it and it's the pronoun it and i have you know don't you get the vibe i bet you all did that it what it what is it logically referred to okay now here's the thing about it we're going to take this to a sophisticated level a pronoun like it refers to an entire noun phrase okay there's some other kinds of pronouns that don't do that those and that do not do that they can refer to just a piece of the phrase so for instance those could refer to energy okay but it refers to the entire preceding idea in it okay okay so it has to refer to something that a noun the whole idea of a noun so for instance this would refer to 75 of the energy produced in france that it could refer to that or it could refer to nuclear power those are two possible nouns that it can refer to but notice it doesn't just refer to energy so this it refers this whole thing and if we know this okay then we can see that this it doesn't make sense at all because it doesn't make sense to say while in germany 75 of the energy produced in france is just over 33 it doesn't make sense if we if we replace the it with this we get insanity right or if even if we replace with nuclear power while in germany nuclear power is just over 33 of what like what is that you know it's just not a well it's not an effective sentence and this it kills it for us this is an easy out getting rid of our easy out okay b i bet it's going to be easy out too if we know our comparison rules over 75 percent of the energy produced in france derives nuclear power compared to germany you know i don't know so the energy which uses just over 33 this is comparing 75 of the energy produced in france with germany it's an easy out not that many people picked it if you know your comparison rules you're going to get this you're going to get rid of a bob b and if you know your pronoun rules you get rid of a so notice we're taking a concept and applying reduce you know okay let's move on see whereas nuclear over 75 of the energy produced in france derives nuclear power whereas nuclear power accounts for just over 33 percent of the energy produced in germany i'm not sure how much i like this because this one starts off with energy produced in france and says it derives from nuclear power and this starts off with newt starts off with the opposite starts off with nuclear power and ends with germany so the economy aren't similar i mean it does sort of make sense i'm going to keep the choice but let's see what else we have uh d whereas just over 75 percent of the energy produced in france derives nuclear power well whereas just throw over 33 percent of the whereas just over 33 of the energy comes from nuclear power in germany you know this sounds we have 75 and 33 and nuclear power and nuclear power right so this matches up the two clauses match up so i you know that sounds pretty good too it's not an easy out this is how we do it we get rid of the easy outs we keep the the infamous last two choices okay let's check e over 75 percent of the energy produced in france derives from nuclear power compare with the energy from nuclear power in germany where it is just over 33 we got in it again what do we learn it refers to the entire thing with the nuclear power in germany so the energy from nuclear power in germany that's what it has to refer to the entire thing it can't just refer to energy now let's refer to the whole idea the whole noun phrase so let's see let's plug that in compare with the nuclear energy from nuclear power in germany where energy from nuclear power in germany is just over 33 makes no sense at all we can get rid of this choice i see another error too where it is just over 33 of what i don't know right over just over 33 percent of what who on earth knows it doesn't it's totally meaningless so we're down we're down to d c and d now a lot of people pick d and i can see why because this starts off with energy produced in france this starts off with 33 of the energy here then we jump from nuclear power and nuclear power here it looks parallel it looks perfect and we've all heard the comparisons have to be the same but let's really look at what d says we have remember we're saying we're articulating we're noticing issues we have to notice an issue with d it says whereas just over 33 percent of the energy comes from nuclear power in germany what energy is it talking about i mean this choice isn't looking good anymore you know everything else lines up it's all grammatically correct and it kind of lines up but what energy is the energy we're picking up on an issue and let's articulate it it's unclear what energy we're talking about so this we would articulate d looks correct it's grammatically correct it's parallel but we don't know what energy we're talking about so maybe we're gonna you know maybe c works let's compare the differences you know the difference let's check the difference between c and d they both start with whereas does this work whereas nuclear power accounts for just over 33 of the energy produced in germany c is absolutely clear whereas d is not so c is actually starting to look correct and if you're sitting there on the test you should be picking up on this and saying you know i don't really like c because nuclear power comes at the end of this clause in the beginning of this one and germany comes in france and the energy you know and energy and france comes at the beginning of germany comes at the end so what is going on you know the 75 percent is here and the 33 is later so they don't seem to match up but here's the deal if you know your rule you know that whereas does not work like unlike whereas is different what comes after whereas is a whole new clause so this part of the sentence that part of the sentence doesn't have to match that the first clause they don't have to match perfectly when they use whereas okay they don't have to match they are two separate clauses if you know this if you know your sentence correction rules then you know that they don't have to match so actually c is fine d doesn't make sense c is in the game and we just got this question correct because of what we knew our stuff we knew about these pronoun rules we knew about this pronoun rule we knew about our comparison rules and we also picked up on this crazy little issue this subtle little issue so it did turn out not to be a 500 level question after all didn't so we got some questions on this one yeah okay so the uh this this is uh covered in the target test prep uh yeah it is com it's covered in the comparisons chapter so you need to know that and you know it's once again it's totally logical whereas is connecting two clauses this is a whole clause a clause can express an idea just fine without looking just like the one before i don't have to say john went to the store and jim went to the store we did do we always write like that no we say like john went to the store and he happens to like it or john went to the store and then later a house burned down two clauses don't have to match exercise don't get this but what did the gmat do they checked to see whether you would notice them they checked to see whether we would notice that whereas is connecting two clauses it's not like i'm like right they're going to do this to us constantly this is called as we know a trap choice right they're trying to fool with us to make us think that they have to look the same do you notice so sentence correction in most of team app verbal is about noticing what's going on and using logic to arrive at the right answer the id is a nice trap it looks so nice and parallel okay so we all get that so you know that was another takeaway the gmat is gonna make the incorrect answers this choice certainly looks nice doesn't it it certainly looks nice it's nice and parallel it all seems to match up we feel good it's all grammatically correct but we had to take it to the next level and that's the difference between scoring 35 and scoring 45 on verbal right you know if you see these basic things you're going to get into the 30s you want to get in the upper 30s and 40s you have to take it to the next level okay next one okay fine we'll go back one last time d is not correct because it says over 75 of the energy produced in france derives from nuclear power whereas just over 33 percent of the energy what energy what energy is that what is energy is this the energy 33 of the energy comes from nuclear power in germany so is that the energy in france it sounds like it but 75 and 33 adds up to over 100 or it's maybe the energy in the planet i don't really know what energy is that it's a subtle issue but we're looking for effective sentences and if someone wrote that sentence in a book you read it be like well what does he mean it can't be like that we're looking for effective sentences and it's not an effective sentence okay let's go through this one what do we do first step read the entire thing so we get a sense of the entire sentence so they can't smoke us by having choices that look right but actually don't fit the whole thing okay according to some analysts the gains in the stock market reflect growing confidence that the economy will avoid the recession that many had feared earlier in the year and instead come in we need a little underlining here instead come and for a soft landing followed by a gradual increase in the business activity okay so it's a basic sentence and and the key thing according this according to some analysts we can kind of ignore this and say the gains in the stock market reflect growing confidence that the economy will avoid the recession that many have it looks pretty good that the recession had many if you're early so we're going to keep that let's go to b growing confidence in the economy to avoid the recession what many had feared early in the year rather to come that is starting to look like a mess but there's a reason why i brought this question up and i'm bringing it up because it does something that we need to it's a cool thing that gmat does i call it right idiom wrong place notice they did here growing confidence in the economy certainly we've all heard the citimatic structure growing confidence in x so a lot of people choose this choice because they say well it totally makes sense growing confidence in the economy but the problem is this stadium is the wrong place we don't say growing econom confidence in the economy to do something we if we're going to say that the growing of confidence that the economy will do something we say it the way a says it okay so the reason i brought this question up is to show us about this thing called right idiom wrong place so yeah we can all learn our idioms we can learn our rules we can learn our structures but we have to learn how to apply them and the key thing here is we can it doesn't make sense to say growing a confidence in the economy to avoid the recession this is not how we use growing a confident growing confidence in x we don't do that also this is a little awkward what many had feared to avoid the recession what many had feared i mean i guess it's sort of okay and this rather to come is really insane when we see something round x rather than y we have so we could get rid of this that's one technique we can use is get rid of a modifier and see what's it says around it growing uh confidence in the economy to avoid the recession rather to come in for a soft landing that's completely bonkers choice b is gone don't say to avoid rather to come you know we might say to avoid but rather to come to avoid and rather to come but we don't say to avoid rather to come okay see growing confidence in the economy's ability to avoid recession now we have growing a confidence in the economy's something in the economy something right if i ever learn why it does that that would be great uh in the economy's ability so we can have confidence in something that perfect so now we're using the right idiom in the right place to avoid the recession something earlier in the year many had fear look what they did here they're saying something earlier in the year many had feared but we're taught so something look at this modifier earlier in the year something earlier in the year so they feared it because it was something earlier in the year it doesn't make sense because we're talking about growing confidence in something that'll happen in the future so this was not earlier in the year is this an obvious misplaced modifier no is it a meaning issue if we read it literally yes so let's do this again growing confidence in the economy's ability to avoid the recession many had feared and instead to come in for a soft landing so we're talking about something in the future not something earlier in the year we have to pick read the sentence holistically right we're reading the sentence holistically saying this is about the future so this is recession is not something earlier in the year it's something many had feared that would happen or you know and it would happen in the future but by the way the earlier in the year we had just come here uh many had feared but is the sentence effective no right we're looking for an effective sentence so we just articulated why this is wrong it's not something earlier and you know what we could say well maybe early in the year replies many had feared because it's close to it i don't know doesn't it read something earlier in the year yes absolutely okay it doesn't say many had feared earlier in here if we had that modifier over here it would work fine but that's not where it is it's right here modifying something and something refers to recession so it's something it's saying the recession is earlier in the year clearly it's in the future c for that subtle reason is out next d growing confidence in the economy to avoid the recession look what we have here again we have this growing confidence in x misused right once again right idiom wrong place we can say growing a confidence in the economy we can't say growing up confidence in the economy to avoid we would have to say growing confidence that the economy will avoid right a.m wrong place if you know about that it saves you a lot of trouble because you won't go through and just say oh it's idiomatically correct yeah it's correct to say confidence in x but it's not correct to say confidence in x to a boy that's not the way we use it we say you know we use it like the way it's used in c okay we have one last choice growing confidence that the economy will avoid the recession that was feared earlier in this year by many within instead coming okay look what you know man we had to read this choice the whole way to the end because we see this with and instead coming and on the gmat when you see width something should actually sort of be with something you there's either two ways something can be with something you either use it i hit the nail with a hammer or you could say are there a few ways one of them is to say i did it with this another one to say john is actually with sue or you know steve is with alvira or whatever it is but we don't use it this way that the economy will avoid the recession it was fear with it instead coming the economy is going to avoid the recession with something you know it's not just not well expressed and you know is it awful is it insane no but let's compare now we have two choices we got we're down to the infamous last two choices growing confidence that the economy will revo avoid the recession many had feared early in the year look here the fear earlier is right by fear and instead come in perfect why would we choose anything else growing confidence the economy that was feared earlier this year by many that's a little funny but fine it has the passive voice look at that uh that's okay though it's okay but the width kills this thing this is just not as good as what we're seeing today i don't really know what the economy will avoid within instead so the economy will avoid within instead what does that mean how does the economy avoid a recession with something doesn't make sense it's not quite logical it's just a little off a works better that's the way we get rid of the infamous last two choices we're down to a a it's correct checking for your questions and then we'll move on okay so everyone gets this one great the meaning of e is a little off it just doesn't make sense to say the recession was feared earlier the economy will avoid the recession with and instead coming it's just not a great way to express it it's not an effective sentence looking for effective sentences on to the next one this one once again teaches a great lesson okay let's hit start by reading the entire sentence to get a holistic feel for it although napoleon's army entered russia with far more supplies than they had in their previous campaigns it had provisions for only 24 days okay although napoleon's army entered russian with far more supplies than they had i'm a little questioning and this is we're going to blow through this question but if i were if you're looking at this on the test and you were a little stumped you might say you know it far more supplies than they had seems to work with army pretty well you know i mean could army be plural maybe you know i don't know sometimes those collective nouns it seems okay so i'm going to move on to the next choice all the napoleon's army entered russia with far more supplies than their previous campaigns had had you know it's a little i don't like that one as much but i don't know why couldn't this they have more supplies than their previous campaigns had i don't like it as maybe as much as a don't see a clear reason to eliminate it see all in appalling his army and russia with far more supplies than they had for any previous campaign i don't like that four to be honest they had for any for any previous campaign but it's not the worst thing so what am i gonna you know okay how about d all in apparently his army enter russia with far more supplies than in their previous campaigns i don't like that one at all so i'm going to get rid of d okay because i don't think the supplies are in the campaigns and e although napoleon's army entered russia with far more supplies than for any previous campaign my first instinct really to be honest is to get rid of you because this is an awful comparison they entered russia with far more supplies than for ennious previous campaign so you know what if it were up to me and i'm taking the test he is gone i kind of don't like c because as much i really like a the most but you know what these all seem to work far more supplies than they had in their previous campaigns pro more supplies in their previous campaigns it had far more supplies than they had for any previous campaign and when this happens to you and it probably will one of the things you have to do is go did i really read the non-underlying portion of the sentence and if you notice i didn't i only read the beginning of the non-underlying question but i didn't read the end and this happens to me all the time so the one of the big lessons with this is when you see three two three choices that all look good you might not have read the underlying non-underlying portion of the sentence and as soon as i read the underlying portion of the sentence i see what do you see and i think a lot of you did see this it says it it had provisions for only 24 days well we certainly have a big clue here that the army it must refer to the army well by the way you can't have the army be singular and plural at the same time either we're using this as a group noun and you're saying it's they or we're using it as a singular noun and saying it's it but it can't be both you know what just happened a is gone b is gone c is gone he is gone well we eliminated e because it's an awful comparison they entered russia with far more supplies than for any previous campaign i don't know man is that a really good comparison would we ever write it like that do you expect it to be that way wouldn't we see far more supplies than they had far more supplies than they entered with something like that far more supplies than four any previous campaign what for what where's that where does that connect you entered for you know there's no real great way to do this but by the way we're looking for the best choice not for a perfect choice so even though we checked off and said e doesn't work we have to change our mind lesson number three about this question is that sometimes the choice we're so confident is wrong it's going to turn out to be the correct answer and honestly there's just no way any of these puppies up here are correct they they they're they there will not go within right there's no chance they're all gone the only possible one is one we all probably wanted to eliminate because it's a bizarre comparison e is correct is it perfect is the way we write the sentence no is it the best yes so their biggest lesson with this question well they're two huge ones if you're choosing if you see three choices or two choices or a bunch of choices that look correct go back and make sure you read the non-inline portion it's going to serve you so well i mean i've been doing this for ages and it can still i mean you know i don't know if i'm making a mistake but i see two choices that look right and i go aha let me check the non-underlying portion of the sentence and that will take me out of that that dilemma so often so you're like well i may have to guess between these two don't you know ah man these all look the same i hate this question check the not only portion and the second lesson is be our second lesson is be ready to re-select the choice that you already eliminated like this one here be ready to select and this goes for critical reasoning reading comprehension and sentence correction okay that you often will eliminate a choice keep it in your back pocket keep your eliminated choices in the back pocket because you may need to de-eliminate them and then finally the final the final lesson here is the correct answer to a sentence correction question is not always perfect so don't be quickly eliminating choices because they have a little i don't like this comment here you know what i mean and say well that's gone it's gone and then you're choosing between the last four choices it may not be a perfect choice so we have to be ready to handle imperfection so if it has a little imperfection eliminate it last and also be open to the idea that the correct answer could be pretty messed up like this one what is that you know but by the way by the way i'm not saying that this question is unanswerable because the other choices are so clear these have fatal errors this these plural pronouns are fatal errors these are gone there's no way we can choose these choices so even though the correct so-called correct answer is a little freaking and not the best thing we can eliminate four and definitely get this right okay so it's not is it subjective not really there is a correct answer that we can all sing okay we're going to take a break for a minute uh there's going to be a link in the chat where we can where you can enter to win the prizes the gmat club test or the 10 day target test prep subscription so anybody that wants to enter to win those prizes can do that now okay just uh we had a couple questions somebody asked about ellipsis there's not a great ellipsis here uh you know i don't know although napoleon's army entered russia with far more supplies than for any previous campaign i mean far more supplies than i guess maybe we could say there's some kind of ellipsis with supplies than supplies for any it doesn't really make sense honestly and i've seen this a few times in these you know these these uh sc comparisons you know we all learn all these great comparison rules and how to should be logical and how to use ellipses and then they pull this you know man it's just what are you gonna do you just gotta get you have to get it right and they're gonna do that a little bit uh the questions aren't always the correct answer is not always perfect okay let's move on to critical reasoning now that we've blasted sentence correction i'm going to do something similar with critical reasoning we're going to learn uh we're going to see some cool things from some questions we're going to take critical reasoning to the next level we're going to take it to the v40 levels uh someone's asking if you're using a target test prep course when should you start doing time practice uh if you're working and the answer is if you're working this way you know go for the high accuracy and try to work the time start trying to work the time down don't necessarily cut yourself off at a minute 48 per question on average or two minutes per question start working the time down can you get it down to two and a half minutes per question can you get it down to two minutes per question just try to work the time down then nearer to your test you know when you start taking practice tests you could do the literal time practice but your first step is really just to practice driving the time down and by the way if you're doing this analysis and you're doing this on time practice you're going to get fast anyway the time almost becomes irrelevant because you become so skilled and so clear about what's going on these questions and articulating all these issues and knowing how to use this strategy the the time becomes irrelevant okay so let's talk about how we master critical reasoning and it starts off sort of like how we master science questions we definitely need you know there's some concepts that if we know them they're really going to help concepts such as the parts of the argument like if you know that some part of the argument is an assumption if you know about the support if you know what's the conclusion if you know how some of the key words were it's certain you're certainly going to be starting off in a good place in critical reasoning okay so you definitely want to learn some concepts okay the next thing and this is super important critical reasoning is learning effective strategies for answering critical reasoning questions about each type and here's the thing you know a lot of time we can get them right and we can uh by just doing whatever reading the passage you go to the choices you pick up on the answer and why it's right first show but here's the thing if you learn some effective strategies then when they start getting harder you're going to have a clear pathway clear things you need to do as you proceed through the question it helps a lot like if you know to read the passage first read the question second and let's say it's a weakened question okay so i read the question now my next thing to do if it's a weekend question is go back and identify exactly what exactly what the conclusion is it's just so much clearer than if you just read the passage and help your skeleton go to the answer choices you know it's a weakened question you know okay it's supposed to do this if you know okay i'm going to read the question and then i'm going to read the conclusion and i'm going to identify that it's going to solidify what you're doing okay and the other thing is with strategies are so key because when we take the test if we have an effective strategy and you let's say you get distracted you know what you're supposed to be doing so no matter if you're nervous or distracted or tired or rushing you know what your strategy is and if you've been doing this all the way along as you've been practicing then when you get to the test you're going to you know you're going to do what we just said you go to the pastor go to the question go to the conclusion grow the support you're going to know exactly what you need to do so you're not going to flail around it's that you know we've all had that experience when you're seeing a verbal question like well i don't even know how to proceed here i don't even know where to start i'm nervous i'm tired the proctor's making a lot of noise the guy next to me is tapping the desk if you have that strategy all lined up you know exactly what to do and you're not going to run into those issues so learning effective strategies is not only going to make you more accurate and more effective it's going to make you more efficient because you can know what steps you need to take you're not going to be cruising through the question or you know looking up and down trying to figure out what's your next move and if something distracts you or anything goes wrong you're going to fall back on the strategy you're going to instinctively know exactly what to do so learning effective strategies is huge finally as we do with any other type of verbal question or any other type of uh gmat question we'll practice to develop skill in analyzing the relationships between answer choices and passages so practice is key like it is with any other question and in critical reasoning we're practicing analyzing the relationships notice it's not we didn't say practice answer critical reasons questions in a minute and a half each right we're analyzing we're gonna and we're gonna see this as we do these questions we're gonna carefully analyze these relationships that's what you're doing when you're practicing critical reasoning so once again if you know all if you get a question correct but you haven't done this then you're not really practicing critical reasoning effectively you you know yeah you vibed your way you got you you know you sort of figured out why choice c is correct but you didn't analyze relationships between the choices and you know what yeah you can get uh uh an easier or medium critical reason question correct sort of vaguely your health or skelter but if you want to nail these the hard critical reasoning questions and master critical reasoning okay then you have to learn to analyze relationships between the answers and passages we're going to do that as we proceed so let's go question number one remember to wait for people in case you've seen this question before don't put your choice in too soon give everybody a minute or two to get through this please okay looks like we have a conservative consensus we gotta have a lot of votes for one choice and a few votes for some others as well so let's go through this and and we're gonna use the strategy and we're i'm gonna show you an interesting thing you can do as well that uh they can help with no matter how hard a question is and it's using arrows and direction so this question will read the passage first i always say to read the passage first i know a lot of people like to read the question first more power to you but uh i personally you know if that works for you that's fine too but i read the passage first just because if i read the question first i'm thinking about the question as i read the passage and i personally want to pick up on all the details these little things in the passage and if i read the question first then i'm sort of thinking well what's the support like if it says like this question says cast the most doubt on the effectiveness well now i know it's a weakened question so i'm going to be looking what's the support what's the conclusion if i just read the passage on its own without doing that first then i'm gonna probably pick up on little details like this since the deregulation delays have increased by 25 at the increasingly busy airports isn't that interesting all these little details have increased by 25 to combat this problem more of the takeoff and landing slots at the busiest airports must be allocated to commercially okay so we read the passage we get the idea the general idea that sinister regulation delays have increased by 25 to combat this problem more of the takeoff and landing slots must be allocated to commercial airlines okay so this person's conclusion is that in order to combat this problem you have to allocate take off a landing slot right so which of the following if true cast the most doubt on the effectiveness of the solution so we know this is a weekend we're casting the most out on the effectiveness of the solution what is the solution now we go back to the passage and make sure we totally get it the solution is more take off in landing slots must be allocated what's the support the the airports are busier and delays have increased by 25 percent okay notice does this person say therefore does it use does he use keywords no okay but we can tell what the basic conclusion is and why this person thinks this is true because the airports are increasingly busy now let's go through these choices and here's the key thing we're gonna we're going to we're going to analyze the relationships between the choice and passage in order to do that we really want to consider direction so this person is saying what has happened delays have increased so we're going to put a direction on that delays increase so now what should we do we should allocate more takeoff and landing slots so we're going to increase takeoff and landing slots and we can do this all with ours how cool is this then the delays are going to decrease that lays out this passion so well did we need to take a thousand notes no but we just saw delays have increased we can increase takeoff and landing slots and therefore delays will decrease that's this person's idea so let's look at a not e since deregulation the average length of the delay at the biz nation's busiest airports has doubled average length that's double so what kind of arrow this gives us an up arrow right delays have increased you notice what this what is the relationship between this choice and the passage and we can use this there's a million ways that you know they could say i don't know it's irrelevant or something but let's define the relationship because if we define the relationship then we're going to be sure of whether we should uh eliminate it you know and especially in a harder question we really need to define that relationship so this is saying the delays has doubled so here's what they were and now they're up twice okay great this just qualified our up arrow for delays didn't it it's it's the relationship between this choice and the passage is it qualifies the passage does qualifying the passage cast out on the effectiveness of the solution no okay let's go to d after a small midwestern airport doubled its allocation of takeoff and landing slots the number of delays decreased so this is saying allocation went up decrease went oh boy nice sorry it's saying allocation went up and delays went down well that's exactly what we want to happen does that decrease our uh does that weaken our argument no it's saying did something exactly what we want to have happen did happen so clearly this goes in the wrong direction this strengthens the argument that's the relationship is it irrelevant no right it's totally not irrelevant even though someone could say well this is a small midwestern airport okay it's a little it's a little it's a little off target because a small midwestern airport it's not our uh our target here we're talking about the nation's increasingly busy airports you know i don't know but this is a small midwestern airport you could say maybe it doesn't apply but honestly if it does anything it strengthens the argument so that's the relationship notice what we're doing we're not just going through irrelevant uh relevant or word matching or this is this talks about the same thing as the passage we're actually defining the relationship between the choice and the passage okay see over 60 percent of the takeoff and landing slots are the nation's busiest airports reserved for commercial airlines well this definitely has a relationship with the past it just tells us how many slots we can do if we allocate more of the takeoff and landing slots and what it really tells us is that 40 are left because if 60 are used there's 40 left that's a lot so that if anything i would think this kind of strengthens the argument if anything because it tells us there are a lot of takeoff and landing slots so if we allocate more we can allocate a lot more i don't know does it really anyway it certainly doesn't weaken the argument that 40 of the slots are allowed and that's what we need to do is weaken the argument so this how about b since airline deregulation began the number of airplanes in operation has increased by 25 what's the relationship between this choice and the passage anybody have a uh idea what what the relationship between b and the passages because uh it's an interesting one it doesn't matter so much for a weekend question okay b the relationship between b is it explains why since deregulation the number of airplanes has increased this explains why delays have increased right delays have increased because the number of airplanes has increased it explains it and often an answer choice will explain and a lot of time they do this in a strengthened question because an answer choice it explains seems to strengthen the argument so it's that's you know we could see how important it would be to understand that a choice explains what's going on so this is what does it explains why the delays are the number of airplanes has increased okay cool that explains why delays have increased but we're not trying to explain it are we we're our job is to cast out on the on the effectiveness of our solution so this choice is out okay so that leaves us with a and a lot of people don't pick a because why because it says the major causes of delay are bad weather and over tax air traffic control equipment so a lot of people say well if these are this is about bad weather and overtax air traffic control equipment it's not about landing slots or about increasingly busy airports doesn't say anything about landing slots it doesn't say anything about your regulation talks about bad weather it's irrelevant well here's the deal we already eliminated four choices we have and the real the real thing with the correct answers to to critical reasoning questions is not to look for wording matches or quite you know i don't know the correct answer often looks irrelevant because they use wording that looks different from what this says the passage and why would that be because the correct answer has to provide new information especially in a weakened question we need new information otherwise the plan looks good like for instance okay choice e gives us the same information we already had that's not new information okay this is giving us more information about the situation but it doesn't really this is not telling us something earth shattering why our plan is going to work this is explaining what's going on but you know what this is giving us totally new information and totally new information is often what's going to rock our argument like wait a minute mostly delays are because of bad weather man you can give him all the landing slots you want and you know what it's not going to combat the problem at all because most of the delays are caused by bad weather and overtax air traffic control equipment so i don't know if your plane is going to work we just destroyed our plan with new information absolutely destroyed it right okay so this is out a is our correct answer okay so once again notice what we did we read the passage we read the questions then we went back to the question to the passage rather to see what was going on and then we went through and checked out the relationships between the choices in the past if we didn't just go through and look for wording or relevance or relevance this looks the same we nailed this thing we knew exactly what's going on with this choice there was no way once we did that once you analyze the relationship with each choice in the passage there's no way you're getting so correct answer is indeed a it's a 600 level question it's not we're going to do with some harder ones next okay let's move on if you've seen this one in ttp please don't just jam your answers before everybody gets a chance got a couple different choices are pretty popular any other ideas okay let's go through this one this is a tricky one a lot of people miss it and uh really this is going to highlight so much while we have to pay so close attention to conclusion these questions read the passage first longview prep board member okay they often do that start off with the person over the last five years the school's administrators have noticed an increase in drug use okay so we have an up arrow right an increase in student drug use and there has been simultaneously a drop in average of our scores okay so we have a down arrow interesting drop in scores on state issued tests of general knowledge i see a detail that's a little suspicious right state issue tests of general knowledge why is it so specific clearly if we can reduce student drug use by incorporating drug use awareness classes into long-term prep curriculum we will increase the averages of long-term view long-view perhaps students stay issued once again state issued test scores it's interesting to levels at which they were five years ago so look it starts off saying something about five years we saw drug use go up test scores go down so now this person is saying if we can reduce drug use then test scores will go back up interesting i mean as soon as we think of it that way drug use went up test scores went down we reduced drug use test scores and go up we realized this guy is assuming that there's some kind of connection between test scores and drug use who knows right so okay let's read the question scam next which of the following is an assumption on which the support for which the board for the board for remembers conclusion depends okay so we have to go back it's in this so we have to identify an assumption an assumption as we know is something that has to be true for the evidence to support the conclusion so this evidence is that over the last five years we saw an increase in drug use and this conclusion is and the averages in the test scores went down okay so now if we reduce drug if we increase the uh excuse me reduce drug use we will increase the averages sort of makes sense but what is this person assuming okay and now there's a key thing we're going to have to notice with the conclusion the conclusion is not that we're going to reduce drug use and this is why we read the conclusions carefully in critical reasoning questions okay do you see anything about this it says we're going to reduce drug use nope it says if we can do it so the real conclusion is if we can reduce drug use the scores are going to go up to the level they were at five years ago if we can reduce drug use so if we we have to be so super clear about the conclusion if you miss the cr question a lot of times you'll look back and say you know what i didn't identify the conclusion and we covered this in this in the ttp course and you know your error tracker does have a spot to say i didn't identify the conclusion because identifying the collusion is so key let's look at choice the students who use drugs the most would not leave longview prep and enroll in other schools because they prefer not to attend drug use awareness classes so we're going to imp you know so this is an assumption that we're not going to lose the students who use drugs the most i got a question what is our conclusion the conclusion is we will increase the averages of state-issued test scores do we have a reason to believe the students who use drugs the most of them people that score the highest on the test why would it matter if these people leave the answer is it wouldn't and nobody said by the way the conclusion is not that we're going to get everybody to stop using drugs so if you picked a you might have been thinking wait how are we going to get these students to stop using drugs if they leave well the conclusion is we're not going to stop it's not that we're going to get them to stop using drugs the conclusion is if we can reduce drug use where drug use at our school then the averages are going to go up and by the way the fact that the kids use drugs the most leave the school is not necessarily going to keep the averages from going up in fact it might even help so if a is not true if a is not true the plan might work even better the kids use drugs that most just leave okay fine either way we will have reduced drug use and the averages may very well go up i don't really know it could be the kids who use a lot of drugs score very high whatever but the point is we don't have to assume this we don't have to assume these kids won't leave now there's another reason why people choose this choice they think well this is an alternative cause of an increase in test score well kids so then you know this is an alternative plan or something an alternative cause they say well this is a cause and effect argument if we can reduce drug use the cause then we will have the effect will be the taste stage test scores go up this is an alternative cause some people say well the kids are actually just gonna leave well that's not the way we do these questions okay yes it's good to know about alternative causes it's absolutely one of the concepts you should learn for critical reasoning but we don't just throw these concepts willy-nilly at these questions okay so you can't you see what i'm saying a lot of the you know it's so easy to go well i know it's a cause effect thing going on here and this is an alternative cause the kids are gonna leave instead so therefore it's you know this is the assumption he's assuming there's not an alternative cause this is we have to look exactly at the question not just pick up a pattern the reason we learn those things like alternative causes is so that we're aware of them we know what's going on when we get to the game we're ready to play we know what's going on in the field usually but it doesn't mean that that's exactly what's going on in this question and in order to get this question correct we have to identify exactly what's going on in this question not just look at a pattern a is out b over the past five years longview prep has not changed its curriculum by shifting the primary focus from imparting knowledge to development of critical thinking and research skills i don't know i don't even know what that has to do with it and when i don't know i keep the choice okay and critical reason when you don't know keep the choice you know i don't know what's he's doing there i don't know what this has to do with it well fine if you don't know then keep it i don't see keep it right i don't see the connection keep it see long view prep students who use drugs are not able to hide their drug use from teachers administrators okay a lot of people choose see a lot of people choose because they think well if they can hide their use of drugs then we may not be able to reduce drug use is the conclusion that we can reduce drug use no right the conclusion is if we reduce drug use then we'll get status to test scores to the levels that we're at five years ago no one said we're guaranteed to reduce drug use there's you know so we don't really care if they're able to hide their drug use the whole question is if we do it we'll get this result that's the person's conclusion so if there's problems then yeah we won't do it but you're not really arguing with me you're arguing with the fact that these classes are going to work there's another issue do we really need to be able to see whether the kids will be able to hide their drug use if they can hide their drug use in order to decide whether these classes are going to work right drug use awareness classes do we need to see whether they're using drugs to put classes to get them to stop using it no so this c is out for two reasons d test focus review sessions would not be effective in increasing long view prep students scores on state-issued tests in general okay this is we've all heard of this the alternative plan choice you know well okay my plan is if we can reduce drug use then our test scores are going to go up and someone else said well test focused review sessions would be effective too does that mean my plan isn't going to work so the relationship between this choice and the passage is it gives me an alternative plan okay and by the way i have a question what if they would be effective what if test focused sessions would be effective would that mean that the scores are not going to go up so this goes in the same direction as my argument if someone said well test focus review sessions would be effective great well i have even more reason to believe now that we can get these state-of-the-art test scores if nothing i mean you know what i'm saying we're trying to say what what is why would this not work because test your focus review sessions they would only help so d is out e most students who use drugs will not eventually reduce their drug use on their own without having to attend drug use uh awareness classes without having attended drug use awareness classes rather okay a lot of people pick e because you're saying wait a minute we don't need to do this but what's the conclusion of the argument people the conclusion is that if we reduce drug use we can get the scores done does the guy ever say that there's no other way to reduce drug use the drug students won't reduce drug use on their own i mean god only knows also when is reducing drug use on your own i don't know 30 years later by the time they graduate is that going to help but anyway leaving that aside the conclusion is that if we reduce drug use the scores are going to go up do we does it get wrecked what if we took out this knot most students will eventually reduce drug use on their own does that wreck my plan no so the relationship between this choice is saying i don't know he's assuming there's no other way things could work out right is this is another way things could work out it's kind of an alternative plan choice kind of like d well it doesn't matter if there's not a way another way things could work out all this person is saying is if we reduce drug use test scores are going to go up it was a very simple thing right here right drug use goes down test scores go up that's all i'm saying so even if the students do reduce their drug use on their own test scores could still go up so my plan still works so now we're stuck with b the one we didn't know what was going on over the past five years longview prep has not changed his curriculum wait a minute by shifting the primary focus focus from imparting knowledge to development of critical thinking and research skills now let's go back and look at something new let's clean this up a little bit remember this detail tests of general knowledge in the passes was talking about tests of general knowledge this is a detail that came up twice state issue test scores down here too right state issue test scores and test the general knowledge well this choice is saying change its curriculum by change shifting the primary primary pokers to primary focus from imparting knowledge to development of critical thinking and research skills well wait a minute if they have changed their curriculum focus and they're no longer focused on pr imparting knowledge isn't that kind of record argument like the argument doesn't work anymore because now we have a whole other fly in the ointment this person's assuming that there's no other issue it could be the state issue test scores over the past five years look at this detail you pick up this detail and it's here over the past five years over the last five years means basically the same thing they've changed its curriculum to from imparting knowledge to the development critical re well that would wreck the whole thing because now you're not really even sure why the test coins went down and now you can say you know bob maybe the test scores went down because we changed the curriculum and so if we reduce drug use nothing is going to happen right so at that point his evidence no longer supports his conclusion so b is the best answer a bunch and a lot of people are okay okay people are asking why he is wrong he is wrong because all this person is saying is that if we reduce drug use scores are going on it won't hurt that if if the students reduce drug use on their own okay we don't need to put he never said this plan is necessary okay the conclusion is not that we need to do this the conclusion is not that if we don't do this their scores are never going to go up all the person is saying is if we reduce drug use by using these classes the scores will go up to the levels at which they work he's not saying we're gonna he's not saying that we're gonna increase these scores infinitely they're just gonna bounce up to where they were we don't need the students we don't need them to not do it on their own if they do if a lot of them do it on their own then who knows the plan can work even better because it's the conclusion is not that this is the only way or that it's necessary or anything else all he's saying is the scores will go back up to where they were if we get rid of jordan i hope that's clear at this point yeah exactly okay one more critical reasoning question a little tougher and this one also has a lesson to learn but let's see if there's any key lessons here one lesson if you don't know what the choice is doing then keep it second lesson pay the biggest lesson from this one pay super close attention to the conclusion and look at our arrows told us druggies went up scores went down if we can make drug use go down okay scores will go up that's all this person is saying and arrows told us the whole thing and so if we know the direction of what's going on then we're good that was a key uh a key thing is understanding that conclusion perfectly okay one more critical reason chris okay let's go through this one read the passage first moderately large city is redesigning its central downtown area and considering a plan that would reduce the number of lanes for automobiles and trucks and increase those for pedestrians and bicyclists so we're reducing look you know if we pay attention to direction it's so clear what's going on here they're reducing lanes for some people and increasing lanes the intent is to attract more shoppers and workers by making downtown easier to reach and more pleasant to move around in so our goal is also an up arrow we're going to reduce lanes for some people increase them for others and our goal is we're going to track more shoppers and workers okay which of the following which most strongly support support the prediction that the plan would achieve its goal so we need this is a strengthened question we want to strengthen this up arrow that we're going to attract more workers and shoppers by reducing lanes for some people and increasing them for others so okay we have to look and find something that's going to make this up arrow happen and convinces us ups the odds increases the odds that it's going to work and there's a couple things we don't want to do we don't want to make up a story and we want to use logic right we want to use logic to support our choice and there's there's an interesting couple things about this question we'll see as we go through okay so let's look at a people make a habit of walking or bicycling whenever feasible derives significant health benefits from doing so that's pretty cool but what was our conclusion remember the conclusion is so important conclusions we're going to track more workers and shop right we're going to attract more workers than shoppers do we need them to get health benefits in order to attract them does that does that convince us that we're going to attract more you know what the truth is this was going on all along they could people could derive significant health benefits before we put these lanes in right so this is not new this is not something that's changing does it really help us to of that these people derive significant health benefits i don't know you know the problem is this is really supporting that this might be better for our this might be a good idea okay if our conclusion was if our conclusion were that this is a good idea this will be good for our town then yes it matters that people derive significant health benefits because we'd be like well i don't know they're gonna be fewer people in the hospital but they're gonna be more healthy people everyone's gonna be happier and healthier that's great but our conclusion is not that it's not that it's good for our town this conclusion is specific it will attract more workers and shoppers and the fact that it's the people are healthy because they ride a bicycle you know that doesn't convince me that it's going to attract more shoppers than already there these people already could have derived significant health benefits without these liens so this makes this is not a strength it supports the relationship between this choice and the passage if we really want to specify it is that it supports the wrong conclusion let's look at b most people who prefer to shop at downtown malls instead of downtown urban areas do so because parking is easier and cheaper at the corner you know i'm not sure what this has to do with adding lanes but it says parking is easier and cheaper at the former and what we park is a car and we're getting the plan is to get rid of lanes for cars so if anything if by making people have a harder time using their automobiles you know we're kind of going against this right because people go to these suburban malls because they can park they can't use their cars so the relationship between this choice and the passage is if anything is a weakener how about c in other moderately large moderately sized cities where measures were taken to make downtowns more accessible for walkers and cyclists that's kind of what we're talking about here downtown businesses began to thrive you know it says downtown businesses began to thrive is that the same thing we're talking about the other thing is i have heard that the gmat doesn't really like a choice about another city you know doesn't like a choice about another city and this is about other cities you know but can we really strengthen an argument about one city with a statement about another city i kind of like this choice it's kind of logical that it would support the arguments sort of but i don't know that i really like it so let's continue on d if the proposed lane restrictions on drivers were rigorously enforced more people will likely be attracted to downtown businesses than would otherwise be under the plan this sounds great proposed lane restrictions are rigorously enforced more people will be attracted this is what we were more people will likely be attracted to downtown businesses isn't that a goal than would otherwise be under the plan i don't know that one sounds pretty good let's let's keep seeing d so far how about e most people who own and frequently ride bicycles for recreational purposes live at significant distance from downtown urban areas huh so these people live far away i don't know how to draw an arrow so far away but let's do this we live far away does that convince me that we're going to have more of them coming if we give them the ability to ride bicycles the fact that they live far away i'd say if anything that shows me that they're going to not want to do it so i'm going to say that this goes against my plan if anything i'm not really sure what it does i don't know what about people who do live in the city maybe they'll come so i don't know if this really kills my plan but if anything it's saying that the people who ride bicycles live far away so why would they even come to my downtown i think it goes against so we're down to the infamous last two choices we have a choice that does something that i've heard the gmat doesn't do which is use what's going on in one city to uh to uh to to strengthen argument about this city and then you know a different city to strengthen argument about this city and then d is saying something about the plan it sounds really relevant right so d is very tempting because we try to find choices that are relevant so this these two are definitely an infamous last two choices and we when we see two the end the last uterus we have to be so careful because one is going to be a pseudo choice it's going to pseudo do what we want so which one's pseudo does it you know i'm kind of leaning towards c at first because it doesn't pseudo do anything it does say that other moderately sized cities had you know that made downtowns more accessible saw their businesses begin to thrive the only way businesses really begin to thrive is because people can get there so it kind of sort of makes sense that this would do it so but now we have to eliminate d so let's read d carefully if the proposed lane restrictions on drivers are rigorously enforced more people would be attracted to downtown businesses and if i read the whole thing the last few words then would otherwise be under the plan do you notice what d is doing it's comparing the plan with itself it's basically saying if everything is rigorously enforced if we have this plan then under the plan more people will show up so cars aren't driving in the bike lanes and people aren't getting run over on the sidewalk or whatever is going on if that's not happening this plan will work better than it will if they're not rigorously a force and everything is held to skelter it's comparing the plan with itself does this say anything about the plan is going to be better than not having a plan no it's just what this is all about what would happen under the plan so this d now i see why this is a pseudo choice because even though it looks relevant it says more people will likely be attracted very cool and it talks about the plan it actually compares the plan to itself how subtle how sophisticated and that's a that's a cool that's a very cool by the way i rewrote this choice a little bit because i actually didn't like it 100 it doesn't say under the plane in the official version which i think is a mistake but i wanted to make a little more sophisticated a little better i don't want any arguments or somebody saying well this question isn't that good because it doesn't really make clear what's going on so yeah anyway that's a fairly sophisticated choice right and that's what that's what we're going to see in a hard critical reasoning question it's something that looks so relevant it really affects me but it doesn't do the job for some subtle reason it's a pseudo strengthener c is correct we're only left with c and here's the thing we have all her that the gmat does this he doesn't like when we compare one city when we use information about one city to strengthen we can assume a question about another city but we have to be so careful of people saying what the gmat does because you know where they get that there's maybe two questions way back when in the gmat prep test or in the official guide that did something sort of like that but the gmat there's new question writers first of all so they might feel a little differently about things and also not every situation is the same and look what they did here they gave us a tell their question writer gave us to tell it says moderately large city here and moderately sized city here come on this question writer is telling us that this is about the same thing that we can compare that something to what choice he says can strengthen the argument it's the same basic side you know the same basic idea if it said a tiny little town then maybe it wouldn't work if it said like a countryside then maybe it wouldn't work but it's just a moderately large city come on it's basically about the same thing and anybody you know if we're just being logical then we can say what applies in one moderately large city probably is going to work in another moderate large city it certainly gives us more support for our prediction that the plan is going to work right and you know the other thing it says downtown businesses began to thrive it doesn't say that more shoppers came but we can also use a little common sense and say if downtown businesses began to thrive then more workers and shoppers probably did show up okay and anyway d is out a is certainly out you know it doesn't it supports the wrong conclusion b is out because it weakens e is out basically a weakener so okay we're stuck with c it works we're good the question works it was gettable you know and if you use a sophisticated approach you're going to get this right let's check your question this is a pretty hard question yeah i mean if people are asking about the other city you know that's you get the idea you and if this goes for sentence correction or anything else these things that you hear the gmat has done be a little careful with that because somebody just saw an old gmat question you know somebody saw an old gmat question and said this is what the gmat does well it's what the gmat did in 2005. that's what the gmat did in 1998 you know on one question but is it the same as this question no so and you know it may use a different question writer so just use your logic analyze your choices and you know don't don't be too into what the gmat does because what the gmat does might not be quite the same in this question it might have evolved okay let's take a one minute break if anybody wanted to enter to win the uh the gmat club test or the target test prep subscription click on the link if you haven't already and someone's asking meanwhile about practicing the questions older than five years old you can practice the old questions you'll certainly learn from them i mean my point is kindly that one what happens in one question even in a new question you might see something and say well this is what the gmat always does but you might be making a generalization that doesn't really make sense or you might be picking up on something that's very specific to that question you know which is basically the same thing yeah you can practice with older questions although i would say some of the older sentence question questions that are super into idioms or something you're probably not going to have to fight that when you take the test today the test has become a little more meaning based a little more sophisticated the other thing is they know people from all over the world taking the test so they don't expect everybody that's you know learned english as their second language to know these little idiom things so they're not really doing that anymore so some of the older questions um they have to kind of rest on some idiomatic construction it's probably not going to apply to what you're doing today also some of the older sentence correction questions aren't actually that well written which is part of the reason why people say well these questions are so subjective yeah some of the old ones were subjective they were they were kind of ridiculous to the point where you know there's a comparison that one of them uses the word had in one version and did another and you're supposed to say well did is better i mean the head works perfectly so that was kind of subjective so some of the oldest sc questions are a little subjective in these idioms but generally you can uh practice with older questions i didn't mean to say that i'm more saying that you can't generalize from what story you saw very specific to one question and say oh this is what the gmat always does you just have to be so careful you know there's a lot of rumors out there that float around in the gmat world people preparing oh this is what you need to do this is what the gmat does just be a little careful with that any flip little thing that's what i'm saying you know to be sure no i anyway okay you don't need to answer just used questions just from 215 about 2015 or in fact the questions from 2015 are from 2010 whatever right use all kinds of questions i practice with all kinds of crummy questions and good questions it all works out because you just use some judgment right you can use an old question go you know what i think this seems a little off but i'm still learning from it use judgment and use the questions let's move on to rc okay our greeting comprehension to master this the first thing we want to do is learn best practices for reading passages okay this is key there's ways to read passages and there's ways not to read passages such as don't just read the first sentence of each paragraph you know things like that the best practice for reading passages includes things like don't not getting bogged down in details noticing what the key points are being ready to summarize it things like that another best practice is just as we saw in critical reasoning read the passage before the first question especially i mean you could argue that maybe it helps you to read the first the question before the passage in critical reasoning but it is not going to help in reading comprehension because you need to see all what's going on in the passage you don't understand it you need to know where the details are because they're going to be questions about all different aspects of the path right so read the passage before you read the first question that's your best practice for reading passages there's some other stuff we talk about in the course you get the idea if you know your best practices you're setting yourself up for a good foundation the second is learn effective strategies just as we were talking about for the other types of verbal questions if you have effective strategies you're going to be set up when you take the test to get through questions accurately efficiently and and effectively if even if you're just distracted right even if you're tired because you know exactly what you need to do you have a strategy you're set up you've done this the same way 20 times or 50 times or a hundred times or a thousand times so you're ready to rock you know oh it says it's an inference question okay i read the question stem very carefully first i look for keywords i find where the information is in the passage you do all these things it just becomes instinctive you know exactly what to do finally to master reading comprehension you have to practice to develop skill in these two things one of them is telling the difference between trap choices and correct answers right we saw this in critical reasoning there's this pseudo choices there's always pseudo choices and they do this it's huge in reading comprehension they write the incorrect choices to look just like the passage they seem to fit it perfectly you want to choose that choice right so we have to get so good at telling the difference between those trap choices and correct answers and which is the flip side of the second thing we're practicing is determining which choice fits or is supported by the passage so we have to see which are incorrect and notice and know what kind of traps they throw at and we have to also be able to see how one choice is supported like what kind of information supports the choice and you have to practice is going to make perfect it's not you're not going to get to uh reading comprehension mastery just by learning the strategies and learning the best practices you actually have to practice executing because so much of this verbal is so much about execution you know i mean for quant if you don't know how to answer a combination question and then someone shows you how to do it you can go from zero to 60 in a second you can go from not knowing anything about combinations questions to getting them right in an hour right an hour later you're getting them all correct and then before you had no idea okay great reading comprehension isn't like that critical reasoning isn't like that you have to learn how to execute you have to learn wait you know i have to keep that answer even if i don't understand it i have to i shouldn't just oh if i get tired at the end of a sentence correction question i shouldn't choose a choice e just because i'm worn out i should keep choices that i uh that i'm not sure about in my back pocket even if i've eliminated them or even if i've confidently eliminated the choice i'm going to keep that in my back pocket i might have to go back to that choice even if it looked terrible the first time around these are the kind of things you learn to do by practicing and so practice is super important verbal so let's hit our first passage as usual please hold off on your choices until everyone started okay let's go through this one and when we're reading these passages we definitely want to understand them but there's but we don't want to get bogged down in the details and this passage has a lot of details in it right so it's definitely a good passage to learn to read for meaning and read to understand but not get totally bogged down you can't always you know totally process every detail a lot of people ask me how to speed up arena comprehension and the way to speed up one way to speed up in gmat reading comprehension is to go through and you know read the passage and you're not going to skin but you don't necessarily have to totally get every detail and you certainly don't have to remember every detail what we're really going to do is just go through and notice where the details are you notice where the parts of the passage are right so the two things we're doing we're reading the passages reading from meaning getting the general understanding of what the passage says and noticing where everything is that way when we have questions to answer we can go back and find it that much more easily okay and you can see that reading the entire passage is going to be the way to do both of those things so okay starting at the beginning in 1994 a team of scientists led by david mckay began studying the meteorite alh 84001 okay so there is our first you know this is our opening sentence which have been discovered okay in antarctica in 1984 so they started began studying the meteorite which had been discovered this is our opening sentence is usually key to the passage and sets up everything else it's not necessarily an important point but it somehow introduces everything so it's usually some kind of key part of the thing two years later the mckay team announced that ala h84 the thing which scientists generally agree originated on mars contained compelling evidence that life once existed on mars when we see something strong a strong opinion like that that's probably really key they announced something about compelling evidence that's huge okay that should jump out at us as an important opinion as a key part of the passage this evidence includes the discovery of organic molecules in lh84001 the first ever found in martian rock okay so we're getting into this evidence organic molecules form the basis for terrestrial life the organic molecules found in alh 84 801 uh yeah are polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons or pahs when microbes die their organic material often decays into ph okay so here's the deal if they have found compelling evidence we saw that that life once existed on mars and we can basically see from reading this without getting totally clear about carbon-based compounds and organic molecules you know they form the basis for life when microbes die their organic material often decays into these things right okay so you get the idea that this is why that they say this is compelling evidence because microbes die they turn into pahs so this is our compelling evidence so the first paragraph is basically saying that these guys found this thing they made this announcement as they're saying it's compelling evidence that life is on mars and when microbes die they're organic and the reason is because when microbes die they make the stuff that was found in the rock okay the organic molecules found in it do we need to know anything else about all these no right that's that's all we need to know from this first paragraph okay we can come back if it says something about carbon compounds you can come back the first ever found in martian rocky says the first ever do we need to remember that you know not necessarily just we need to get the basic idea okay then the next paragraph skepticism about the mckay team's team claims remains okay the skepticism remains however when we see however this is probably an important point does that mean that we only look at the key word however no it's just signaling something and you know i've seen people go through these rpc passages and notice all these keywords however therefore for example here's for example there's another one keyword all he knows is the keywords you know it's great that you know the keywords it's great that you study the concepts but we need to understand these passages okay so we're not just looking at the keywords skepticism about mckay teams claim remains however for example ala this thing has been on earth for 13 000 years suggesting to some that his ph's might have resulted from terrestrial contamination so there's one example of a reason why the skepticism exists however mckay team has demonstrated the concentration of ph's increases in one looks deeper into alh 84001 contrary to one would expect from terrestrial contamination so they're going back and forth right these people are saying look it might have resulted from terrestrial contamination and the mckay team is saying well contrary to what we expect right the skeptic's strongest argument however here's however again and the strongest argument and opinion this is usually super important is that processes unrelated to organic life can easily produce all the evidence found by mckay's team so this might not even come from life for example star formation produces phs moreover ph is frequently appear in meteorites and mullins attributes to your presence to life processes then mckay team noticed that the combination a particular combination of ph's and alh a4001 is more similar to the combinations produced by decaying organisms than to those originating from non-biological processes that's a lot of details right we went back and forth twice but look at this paragraph it's really just about this skepticism okay and they went back and forth so if we need to learn about the skepticism we did i did see something about terrestrial contamination but honestly i'm already like i already like i don't know i'm getting bogged down in these details you know it's easy to wonder to get stuck get super slowed down you're wondering what all this means don't do it you realize there's an argument there's a couple points if you don't 100 get those points you know the po just remember why they're there they're there to show us that these people are arguing back and forth and if we need to go back we know we're all the argument look it's in paragraph two okay so now we've read this passage we got the general id we can summarize it very simply mckay's team started studying this thing which had been discovered in antarctica two years later they announced that it contained compelling evidence that life once existed on mars because the stuff found in it is something that normally happens when microbes die and then however there's skepticism about it that we can go back and forth in a couple points that's it now you go to the first question the passages search which of the following about the clean oh okay i jumped ahead on the questions because i okay fine the passage asserts the primary purpose of the passage is to describe new ways of studying the possibility that life once existed online is it to describe the question is i'm sorry the primary purpose of the passage is 2x so we know it's a primary purpose question and we know that we have to determine what the uh what the primary purpose of the passage was well we know what the passage did we we went through there first explained what mckay found you know what they announced and the reason for it and then i showed an argument that's all it did and you know if we need to get more detail with that we will but right now we know that the primary purpose seems to be to show what they talked what they found and then discuss an argument about it i don't know what else could it possibly be now the key with rc is we constantly compare answer choices with the passage okay that's what we're going to do we're going to look at each choice and carefully compare it with the passages because remember our key thing about rc is that we have to be able to tell the difference between trap choices and correct answers and the way we're going to do that is to go back to the passage and compare so a primary purpose of the passage is to describe new ways of studying the possibility that life once existed on mars it does describe something so this choice does start off correctly which passage does describes now just let's continue with this choice because reading comprehension choices we need to read the entire thing beginning to end describe new ways there's anything of studying the possibility that life was did we ever see any new ways of studying the possibility we saw one thing that they looked at this rock this uh meteorite and they and they decided that it contained compelling evidence but it does do we have any other ways of studying the possibility that life once existed on mars no so we're not describing your ways by the way all this other stuff all this other stuff and the second paragraph is not about anything about new ways it's about a controversy it's about an argument so this a the primary purpose of the passage i don't know if you studied this but if you haven't you need to know this concept the primary purpose of the passage has to cover the entire passage so by knowing that concept and knowing the strategy of comparing the choice with the entire passage we get rid of that okay so concept and strategy work together and if we practice we get second b revise a theory regarding the existence of light on life on mars in light of new evidence you know the the passage does mention new evidence right we did see it up here has been discovered and they contain compelling evidence so this choice could certainly seem correct but we have to carefully compare what's our strategy carefully compare the choice the entire passage if we see anything about revising i don't see anything about where is this theory revised paragraph paragraph one does it fury revised no it just explains what it is paragraph two is it revised no people argue with it nothing revises and if we know the strategy of looking for verbs and reading comprehension choices we know that revised doesn't work and you know honestly i don't even see really a theory to be honest it's really a theory you know so there is some new evidence but we don't revise anything and there isn't a theory so b is out just by comparing with the passage concept and strategy and we can use the same one reconcile is a verb if we know once again to look for verbs in rc reconcile do you see any conflicting viewpoints get reconciled already c is looking so suspicious and look this is not the easiest question by the way but if we're careful we know our concepts and we know our strategies then we're good it has to go the primary purpose question has to go with the whole passage and we need to check the verbs and recognize reconcile doesn't work there at all and if we continue with this choice it does mention conflicting viewpoints so this choice is that's why it's a trap right there are conflicting viewpoints it does bring up convicting viewpoints but it's only the second paragraph for the presented but even that could be okay but it certainly doesn't reconcile them so it's this is a half right choice and if you know your half right trap choices in rc you're going to be you're ahead of the game already because you know to read the whole choice and regarding the possibility that life once existed omar look at that the choice starts off wrong and ends wrong because they're not arguing about whether life exists in a moment they're arguing about whether this rock is evidence of it whether these pahs in the rock are evidence of the uh conflicting viewpoints so uh yeah the evidence of whether the life is online so this is how evaluate a recently proposed argument concerning the origin of alh 84001 you know this is funny because this does look like an evaluation doesn't it i mean the verb seems to work right i think the verb basically works it says evaluate it the second paragraph it does bring up the argument and then this paragraph does sort of seem to evaluate it uh but it's to come to any conclusion you know when you evaluate something i would think you'd have an evaluation and i don't see one so this choice is looking a little suspicious but what's our key strategy for reason comprehension our key strategy is we read the entire choice right that's we're talking about read the entire choice evaluate a recently proposed argument concerning the origin of alh 84001 do we see any argument about the origin no they're arguing about something completely different so how cool is that if you just read i mean here the choices basically seem sort of correct up to this point excuse me the choice basically seems correct up to that point but it's not okay but after that point the origin nobody's arguing about the origin of this thing they all agree that we're uh discovering the mckay team which is generally greed to originate on mars okay so not arguing about the origin they're arguing about something else e describe a controversy concerning the significance of that evidence from the lh84001 well definitely we are we bring up uh the evidence which is all up here in the first paragraph and then the current controversy shows up here so i don't know you know the controversy seems to sort of be in the second paragraph but it the first paragraph introduces it so yeah this choice works we can't pair with the whole passage and you know this does illustrate one key thing with rc that sometimes with these primary purpose questions the first sentence the first paragraph is not the most key thing to the primary purpose in this case the second paragraph is much closer to what the correct answer says because the controversy is all discussed in you know in paragraph two so paragraph one becomes an introduction and paragraph two is really the meat of this thing okay so don't just say this gives us a great illustration of why we don't just go with the first sentence or the first paragraph of the passage and call that the primary purpose right lesson learn so this is a pretty cool question and let me check your questions real quick okay okay next let's go on to the next question and this is a detailed question i already wrote all over this thing let's do it i'll give you a few minutes and let's get this one right remember to carefully compare with the passage that's going to be our biggest thing in our city okay let's go through this one carefully compare with the passage and and get it correct the passages search which of the following about the claim that alh eight four hundred one or eighty four zero zero one originated on mars okay so we're looking for something about this clean and the whole passage is kind of about this claim so this is a little tough right um [Applause] [Music] you know uh the whole actually the whole passage is not about this claim i'm sorry which of the following is origi about the claim that 84 8400 is a lh 84001 originated on mars okay this is a very specific thing this is this is key we always have to read the question carefully and you know what a lot of us including me just for a second there was thinking that this was about the claim that life that disproved that life uh uh existed on mars but this is not the claim that this this question is about we have to so lesson number one be so careful when you read the question it's you know it's it's it's points on the board it's points on the board when you're answering these rc questions to read the question carefully because that's one way they can trick you so you can check that off just by reading the question carefully so this is about the claim that this thing originated on mars well where is that discussed it's not in the second paragraph second paragraph is all about the skepticism the argument the whole thing so where is this discussed the claim that it originated to mars look for the key words in the passage mars is capitalized but it's going to be tough to you know mars is all through this thing um so where are we going to uh where are we going to find this uh this this uh this information for answering the question detailed question use the keywords i see originated that's probably our best keyword for this thing and sure enough i see originated on mars right here in the first paragraph sort of where we knew it was going to be discussed right near the beginning did you remember that you probably did okay a it was initially proposed by the mckay teen scientist they certainly want us to think that this is a trap choice it's called a nearby trap if you know your rc traps you know the mckay team is right by here and it's nearby to reoriginate on mars so you might want to choose a but does the mckay team announce that this thing originally on mars no your name mckay team announced that it contained compelling ever since the lights once existed on mars so certainly it was not it doesn't say according to the passage does the passage assert this no okay it doesn't assert it the passage doesn't support it a correct answer to a detailed question has to be supported by b it is not a matter of widespread scientific dispute uh this sounds a little funny to me you know it's but it seems possible that this is correct it says scientists generally agree that it originated on mars so if they generally agree it's probably not a matter of widespread scientific dispute and here's a cool thing they do this all the time notice what this choice does it says they generally agree and this set is not a matter of widespread scientific dispute so those are kind of the opposite of each other sort of meaning the same thing if you don't agree if you do agree then there's no dispute they do this all the time if you know about this type of choice you're kind of well prepared to see it in the rc questions so that's probably going to be our correct answer uh see it has been questioned by some skeptics of the mckay team's work nobody's questioned this they're skeptic skeptical about something entirely different about the significance of these pahs right does it say anything about mars in the second paragraph no okay so the skepticism the skeptics don't care it has been undermined by recent work on pahs notice this whole thing the key to this whole question is really trying to get us to think that the quote if we didn't read the question correct we're done because we're talking about the wrong claim so now we're fighting our way through these choices and we're saying this is a matter of you know if we if we read the question stem wrong we're going to think this is out and all these start looking has been undermined by recent work you know well this is the mckay team's claim oh man but it was also you know proposed by the mckay team but you know what could really save you if you did that then in that case like three or four answer choices are going to look correct so what do you do you go back and re-read the question if all the answer choices are looking correct you know and then you go wait a minute let me go back to the questions the passages search which is the following about the claim that alha 401 originated mars oh i got the wrong claim so if you're going through the choices and everything's working something is up and you can do two things bounce back to the passage is certainly going to work but also bounce back to the question and the same thing goes for ds if you're going through you're like well i don't know this is something wrong with this any question you can bounce back to the question stem and get a lot out of it critical reasoning you might have read it and thought it was a weakened question it's actually a strengthened question if you're really having trouble eliminating choices one of your moves bounce back to the questions now okay d it has been undermined by recent work on pahs no the claim that it originated on mars is not undermined by anything it is incompatible with the fact that alh has been on earth for 13 000 years we could make this up in our minds that that's you know it's incompatible with that in fact it's been on earth for 13 000 years but just the passage support it compare with the passage uh which should be discovered in antarctica let's find does it say 13 000 years it says it here but this is part of a whole other argument it doesn't say anything about the fact whether this thing originated on mars and being on earth for 13 000 years right this is brought up for a whole other reason okay so this is out too you just compared with the passage back to b it is not a matter of widespread scientific dispute it's certainly correct a lot of you got this nice job comparing with the passage and b is the correct answer let me see what your questions are okay i think everyone kind of got this and uh so we don't really need to go through this um question anymore we're gonna i'm gonna wrap up in a minute uh we're gonna do one more draw two so let's let's talk a little bit about how to practice for uh verbal because a lot of people don't hit their team or have trouble hitting their gmat verbal scores just because they're not practicing effectively this is so key you know every day someone says to me man i really you know i've been practicing i've been using a ttp course and my my gmat verbal score is just not what i wanted to be yeah what is going on what do i have to do and day after day i tell them do these three things or do these things do your practice topic focus okay so learn the the um do one question type at a time do weaken questions one after the other that way you can apply what you learned when you got when you did one question to the next question your skill is getting better in that specific topic here okay topic focused practice works great you learn to apply your concepts and get better and better and better at applying certain concepts second one this is maybe the best the biggest one of all practice on time okay and you know i'm not saying practice sometime till the day before your test because then you show up for the test and you're like wait i'm used to spending 15 minutes per question and now i only have two okay that's not going to work out but most of the time do your verbal practice and honestly even your quant practice on time if you don't gain anything by cutting yourself off at two minutes and getting questions wrong it works much better to learn to get them right even if it takes you an hour per question and i'm you know not many people need an hour per question but some people do and i've seen it somebody told me yeah i'm spending it you know it's common for people to spend a half hour per question honestly on verbal questions and you know what that's fine just practice some time learn to get them right first you need high accuracy to get a high verbal score you know you need to get like if you want to score in the 40s you have to get nine over 90 or about 90 of the questions correct right so and that's including that's medium and hard if you're scoring in the 40s by the way you're not even going to see any easy verbal question so you have to be able to get something like 90 percent of the medium and hard questions you see correct if you want to score in the 40's and levels and the way you're going to learn to do that is practicing on time right and it's it's cool you get to analyze all the choices and see other relationships the questions are cool they're well written um there was one guy i saw recently on gmat club saying that he was practicing he met verbal he was doing eight or ten questions a day and he had a nice high verbal score uh he was real happy with and he was doing about eight or ten questions a day on time analyzing every choice and the other thing is we'll go to this next understand every choice okay as we saw we want to understand every choice and by the way you're saying well i'm only doing 10 or 15 and you know certainly not 30 or 50 questions a day but you're doing five choices per question so if 10 questions becomes 50 choices 50 chances to analyze carefully that's a lot you saw how many questions have we done here we've been on for three hours we did four sentence correction three we did four and three that's seven plus two we did nine questions in three hours i mean it's not quite three hours but and we've done so a few other things but still okay you get the idea you know you and that's about how much time you need to spend on the questions to really see what's going on in every choice and that's how you learn to do this so understand every choice when you get to the infamous last choice is our next point okay when you get to these infamous last two choices don't give up you really have to stick it out with the infamous last two choices and a lot of time there's going to be a pseudo choice or a really cool trap choice especially in the harder questions you're going to say i don't know which one of these is correct and you're going to be so tempted to guess don't do it stick it out until you decide which of those infamous last two choices is correct make sure you see it that's how you're going to excel if you can't get the infamous last two choices correct in practice you're not going to get a correct next time or on the test right you have to stick with it so that when you do the question for real you can get to the end of it so practice getting to the end even if in the beginning it takes you a half hour per question fine it took me man it took me you know 20 minutes just to figure out the last two choices do it and you know what next time it'll take you 15 the next time it'll take you 10 next time i'll take you five and you're learning how to get through those infamous last two choices because really i mean when you get right down to it if you're any good at all at gmat verbal you're really choosing between the last two answer choices in a team up verbal question right that's what really is going on because you're going to eliminate those first three no problem most of the time so what you're really practicing is is eliminating one of the last two choices so stick out those last two choices next become comfortable with being uncomfortable yeah choosing between the last two choices it's going to be uncomfortable you're you can feel physically ill you can be angry at the question you can be like i can't stand this or it's beating up my confidence all these things be comfortable with that that's what it's going to feel like when you're taking the test too be totally comfortable with with you know finding your way through these questions man i can still look at you some of these questions after all these years and i can look at the question going man these two choices look exactly the same and how does how comfortable does that feel for me i haven't done this for all this time you know and i have to sit there and sweat it out and look did i look at the non-underlying portion is there some key difference what's the difference between these two choices what really matters here analyze these two choices just like anyone else and it's uncomfortable it's emotionally uncomfortable it's mentally uncomfortable it's painful i don't see the difference what's going on stick it out become comfortable with being uncomfortable finally we must work carefully to avoid careless mistakes gotta avoid carefully when you're practicing that's all you notice it's so easy to miss these if you miss a verb or you miss a certain you know that a pronoun doesn't work with something or you just go for a choice that sounds good you have to be so careful gmat verbal they're i don't know being careful is 30 of it it's so cool because by the way if you're more careful you might drive your score up 20 points or 30 points or 70 points just by being more careful i had a student that was taking the gmat she got ticked off because she messed up the quant section so she really was super intense and verbal and she scored i don't know three to five points higher than she ever had before even on any of her practice tests you know that's 30 that's 30 to 50 points on your test just by being more intense and careful okay and always analyze the question and addre and figure out why you missed it and address that issue right we have to know why we missed a question and we have to address that issue did you not know a concept go back and learn it did you not execute well then do what you have to do to execute better the next time address your issues figure out why you're missing questions and address those issues okay that's how you're going to make progress you're not going to make progress about you know doing the same thing i guess it's pretty obvious so anyway i know every time you do a question if you miss it figure out why you missed it and figure out how to address that next don't be surprised if it's not easy this is the gmat it's a test for getting into graduate school of course the you know you think oh verbal it's just a bunch of words it's just a bunch of passages it's no different from a lot of things i do so what could be so hard about it okay well here's the truth gmat verbal is pretty tall and in fact for a lot of people it's tougher than quant you know because we've all been doing math we all learned you know most of us learned foil back in the eighth grade or something you know or whatever it is so that can actually feel pretty easy you know when you're scoring 40 and quant and then you're scoring 22 in verbal it's like well this is so hard don't be surprised okay it's it's not that easy it's a meant to be a test to get into graduate school you know so can we do this kind of sophisticated thinking it's not easy don't be surprised okay and finally foster a growth mindset this is huge okay you're fostering a growth mindset and um and saying i can do this other people have done it i can do it too right and also it's completely logical that if you just keep developing yourself you keep learning strategies and keep learning concepts you're going to get better at this right like if you didn't know how a modifier works and you learn how like a a participle phrase modifier works okay well now you made a step in a good direction of course your score is going to increase from that then you learn a strategy well i never knew to look so carefully at the at the support for uh for the conclusion in an assumption question well now you do you're going to get assumption questions correct more consistently and then the practicing is going to help too you're going to learn how to how to uh how to execute okay so foster a growth mindset and say look if i just keep learning one thing at a time just like anyone else did i'm gonna learn how to do this and that is gmat verbal how to master it in a nutshell let's see what other questions do we have okay um in the actual exam the timer is clicking [Music] yeah i don't know when the time is clicking on the test naturally you're going to be a little more um you'll be a little more nervous but if you have solid strategies if you have solid strategies you'll uh you'll do you know then you even though the clock is ticking if you're well practiced and well prepared you're gonna be good okay uh which section do i recommend quant or verbal first it really depends on you i always do quad first because i'm a little a lot better at verbal so like i go super intense on quant and then verbal is my kind of like okay i'm good now some people but if you know if i wasn't a lot better verbal but a little better than i might want to do it when i'm fresh because it's my better section so everybody uh everybody has his better or worse section so you really depends on you but i would say generally if you're much better at one then do that second if you're a little better at one maybe do that first something about the okay [Music] okay these questions some of them were from ttp and and most of them were official today because i wanted to grab some old stuff um so that not everybody would have seen it and i know a lot of y'all are using the ttp course so i grabbed some some of them are older questions that i grabbed that i thought a lot of people would have seen already i guess that's pretty much it if you have any other questions you can email me at martial target test prep um [Music] i guess that's pretty much it so we're gonna do another draw at the end of this thing uh you saw that also if you feel like donating to the ukraine cause that'd be great um that's pretty much how to master gmat verbal uh you know clearly there's more concepts that we didn't cover but i hope the uh the general idea of it really got the job done for you hope you all learned some some good things today it's been really fun doing this uh it's for a good cause too i'm happy to see that some people donated is and all this ttp good i've got some more questions how hard is it to go from uh from verbal 38 to verbal 45 depends uh i've seen people go up six seven points in in pretty quickly because they just had to be more careful if it's because you need to learn a lot more concepts then it might be a little harder but a lot of time what you need to do to score a higher verbal is kind of um you kind of need a lot of it's just changing your mentality okay you know like well like how are you preparing like what's your mentality about the verbal section are you being detailed enough you know so so that's going to be how fast can you change the general overall way you're handling this is going to be a big part of your success and going from the 38 to d45 is ttp good for non-natives ttp is great for non-natives uh particularly in sentence correction it's super super complete so a lot of non-natives use ttp and say okay finally i'm finding something that's really covering things we also wrote it to be super understandable so that helps as well but you know the completeness is really really good especially in the sc because you know you need to know all these rules that you don't necessarily know and you know so we're seeing a lot of narnia's really gravitating toward the ttp course does lsat help with rc and cr uh it can the cr is a little different you know some of the choices don't work quite the same or they'll have it like i saw recently in an lsat question they had two conclusions in one and you know so which the answer choice only is this choice that supported one part of the conclusion but not the other wasn't good as good as a choice it supported both conclusions you know you won't see that really on the gmat at least i never have um or i haven't seen it really working that way so you know is the lsat stuff perfect no can you learn to see what's going on and execute well yeah you'll learn that so if you run out of gmat verbal questions you could use lsat questions but i would um i would uh you know do if you practice on time and you carefully analyze the verbal questions choice by choice the verbal practice questions then you'll get a lot more mileage out of them so you won't necessarily need the lsat questions so if you're starting to practice right now let's say if you don't want to run out of gmat verbal practice questions then do them on time and analyze every single choice in sentence correction you can look for two hours in a lot of you know if the choices are longer a lot of time they're two errors in each choice so uh you won't run out of questions if you're if you're operating that way you know it'll take a lot longer there's so many official questions there's so many ttp questions you can definitely own you can definitely use get a lot of mileage out of the questions for how do you improve speed and rc do a lot of reading you know we uh find a list of articles some type of publications you can read like scientific american the economist science daily is a really fun one if you want to read the science passage there's so many different science topics so doing a lot of reading will help you speed up also knowing how to sort of handle the passages and knowing what the key words are and stuff makes the passages come into focus and you know so if you know that however does a certain thing and therefore does another thing the passages come in a better focus for you in which case you can read them faster and i'm not saying to focus on the keywords i'm saying use the keywords to get through the passages more efficiently and also if don't get bogged down in the details you know you saw when we went through the passage that rc passage that bogging down the details is not necessary a lot of time you can like if it says einstein said this and niels bohr said that i barely even read that i'm like okay these guys said two different things and disagree you know that kind of thing will get you through um what else do we have going on is meaning more important than grammar on sc well meaning is almost always important i would say they're both important if you don't see the grammar issues then something might seem like i don't know if it really could mean the right thing if the grammar is messed up but it's pretty important and the other thing is that uh the grammar and the rules you know maybe more the modifier rules and some of the other rules tell you whether the meaning is correct so it's not as if you can skip the rules and say well i'll just focus on meaning because you need some a lot of time you need the rules to understand the meaning and whether it's uh whether it's correct or incorrect you know make sense or doesn't make sense uh prepare consistently when you're working professional you just have to find out how to carve out the time you know when i i ended up when i was preparing for one test just like studying on the subway studying on the train like finding time like man it was tough though i have to admit i totally understand where you're coming from i mean my weekends i would wake up in the morning study fall asleep study some more wake up you know and fall asleep do it do whatever i had to do and staying motivated is tough but you know if you kind of gamify it then that helps to make it fun for yourself okay how many questions can i get right today what percentage can i hit today that type of thing to keep to keep it fun and look at everything you learn instead of looking at the gmat as a syllabus look at each thing you learn as a step oh i took another step my i came in with a you know a a baseline score of 580 but i've taken these 10 steps so i'm pretty confident that now my score is 640 if i want to take the test and then you take 10 more to 15 more steps whatever it is now my score would be 680 if i take the test right so that kind of keeps you going too like every step is like money in a bank when you start going from untimely time practice i mean in the beginning it's totally untimed you kind of work toward time as i was saying before you kind of try to work the time down so as much as you can right like you don't you're not necessarily doing time practice you could still answer the questions in two minutes each right because that's how skilled you are so if you can get your time down to four minutes per question and then three minutes per question and then two minutes per question you know you're working the time down so is it every time practice i don't know and then but yeah definitely maybe a few weeks before your test of the last month before your test start doing consistently doing you know if you want to do it with a timer at that point that's when you should start doing time practices near to your test so that you're not stuck on test day like i said going oh man i'm not used to doing this two minutes per question i'm used to doing an intense ideal timing for rc sierra and rc on the test it's different for everybody i would say rule of thumb is something like a minute and a half to two minutes on sc um something like a minute 45 to 215 on cr and something like an average of two minutes for each rc if you take it with the passage like if it's a four question passes long passage spend eight minutes on the whole thing or maybe you know six to eight minutes on the whole thing it's a little tough to say though i personally spend less time in critical reasoning than sentence correction so everybody's a little different we have a blogs and a lot of this stuff if you google any of these things like how to how to prepare for the gmat while working target test blog you'll find it timing for gmat verbal gtp gmat blog you will definitely find it and you know we've written in depth on all these things uh in the rc and the rc main point question i eliminated the choice e because of controversy you know it's close enough it was sort of a controversy has a few connotations but there was definitely some kind of argument and skepticism and argument you know type of thing going on so that's close enough to controversy um and there and the other choices really didn't cut it so we have to go with uh we have to go with choice that choice choice e or what was the choice anyway are we am i sure that ttp can recreate gmat questions yeah i'm absolutely sure that i mean did we 100 every one of our questions perfectly mimic a gmat question no do a lot of them do most of them absolutely and we spent uh we probably did spend thousands writing the ttv questions the ttp practice questions were often reviewed by three if not four people they're edited sometimes two three times then we get feedback from the students who are using them i mean it's intense i spend some times i've spent six hours writing one question which is basically what a gmat question writer you know spends maybe writes one to three questions a day we put a lot of the time we ended up doing the same thing on the ttp questions that's why they came out just as well because we spend that amount of weeks but we put that into it we didn't we're not writing these questions in tendencies we don't have i don't know there's not an intern in the back writing questions and then we're putting them in the course somebody that's been doing gmat prep for years is spending hours on each question and then they get reviewed i guess that's pretty much it because that's pretty much it for real uh you know questions people asking what do i do if i um one last question what do i do if i exhaust the og questions go through them again and use third party questions you know and use lsat questions if you have to but there's a lot of official questions a lot and you know people say what about third party questions man you can learn so much you're learning to see what's going on i've used the worst questions i learned from them so if you have solid questions like the target test prep questions you can learn so much so just keep prepping do what you have to do use old questions if you have to i guess our time is pretty much up so let's call it a day if you anyone else has questions send them to me through the target test prep chat or through uh email it to me and i can answer it it's been really fun i hope you enjoyed it i really like gmat verbal because i think it's a cool logic game i hope you all learned something today take some good takeaways and thanks a lot y'all you