Preparing for 91Èȱ¬?ÌýIf the answer is yes, then you would probably nod your head in agreement when I state 91Èȱ¬ Reading Comprehension is tough. The Verbal section opens the assault with a strong army of Reading Comprehension (RC) exercises leading the attack. RC can play mind games and can bring down even the strongest of competitors.

Lack of proper learning and practice in RC can spoil the time you need for the other sections and leave you hanging in terms of your target score.

Rakshit Rana was an engineering student who spent a major chunk of his time in engineering classes and labs. After a tiring day at college, he was relieved to get back home to take the nap he earned. His smile was quickly replaced by frustration when he realized his Verbal preparation was pending.

Being an engineering student, Rakshit was able to cope fairly well with the Quant section, but found it impossible to concentrate on the Verbal part.

He performed poorly in his practice tests and scored only 148 in Verbal and spent most of his time in the RC section.

To achieve his target score, Rakshit had to overcome his RC hurdles. His Verbal trainer chalked out a study plan, provided him with comprehensive materials, empowered him with various techniques, and enabled him solve a lot of Reading Comprehension questions.

With a 15-point score boost, he ended up scoring a whopping 163 in his Verbal and a total of 326!

Can some of the tips that helped Rakshit help you conquer 91Èȱ¬ Verbal too?

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Expert Tips That Helped Rakshit Conquer His Verbal Trouble

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#1: Sail Stranger Tides

Reading on subjects related to your field of interest is good. But to get 91Èȱ¬-ready, you have to break out of your comfort zone, start experimenting, and step into unknown territories of literary interests.

This helps you to sharpen your reading skills and enables you to pick out the essentials from any given passage. This practice not only helps you in your Reading Comprehension, but also in your Analytical Writing Assessment.

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#2: Calling the Keywords!

Speed reading, in this case, would mean grouping words and reading the passage very quickly without paying too much attention to “the”, “and”, etc. In short, you have to just grab the essentials of the entire piece of passage rather than beating around the bush.

During speed reading, care should be taken that you identify the important keywords and highlight them. This helps you save those precious seconds of time.

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#3: Bust the Myth!

Some aspirants believe that reading the questions even before reading the passage helps. But sadly it does not. In fact, this has proven to make you take longer to finish the RC question, since you end up reading the passage each time in light of the question. Ìý

Read the passage first and arrive at a gist.

Read the questions carefully and then read the passage a bit more keenly the second time to find the relevant answers.

This also helps you to visually track your answer in the passage.

[EXPERT WEBINAR]: How to Crack Tough RC Passages?
Understand how to find the main idea of a passage, the purpose of a passage, as well as speed reading techniques in just 60 minutes –

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#4: Skim, Scan, & Solve

This is the ultimate speed reading technique that helps you solve RC passages well before the timer runs out.

SKIM: To quickly read the passage and grasp the underlying message, without stopping on words you are unfamiliar with (shorter phrases, bigger punch).

When should you use it?

• Reading the passage for the first time.
• To understand the key idea or objective of the passage.
• To recheck the information provided after you have answered it.

Having skimmed the above passage, you should have gathered an overall understanding of the passage including:

• The topic
• The main idea
• Rough idea of the purpose why the passage is written
• An idea of the flow of the passage (how the argument is built)
• A few key ideas of the passage and their approximate location in the passage

SCAN: Now proceed to the questions and then search the passage for specific details pertaining to the question asked. This is essentially what scanning is about.

When should you use it?

• Searching for a specific answer.
• Finding a specific numerical data in a given passage.

Example:

Read the following question and try to answer it by going back to the passage that you just finished skimming!

Q. It can be inferred that the process described in the passage makes use of which of the following?
A) The tendency of hot air to rise
B) The directional movement of wind
C) The temperature differential between the sea and the desert.

Answers: B and C

Now comes the final section…

SOLVE:

What are you waiting for? The clock is ticking!

Start answering all the questions.

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#5: Jump the Jargon!

Jargon and technical terms, especially ones that pertain to science, economics, etc. are meant to just weigh you down. 91Èȱ¬ does not evaluate your knowledge in any particular field. If you get stuck on terms that you are not aware of, remember that the information needed to answer the questions is always available in the passage itself. So get into the zen mode and forget all the distractions.

In the above passage, you can ignore the words that have been highlighted. Remember, RC tests language competency and does not judge your scientific capabilities.

So this how you hit the googly ball of 91Èȱ¬, which is Reading Comprehension, out of the stadium with your Switch hit!

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[EXPERT WEBINAR]: How to Crack Tough RC Passages?
Understand how to find the main idea of a passage, the purpose of a passage, as well as speed reading techniques in just 60 minutes –

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The post 91Èȱ¬ Super Over – Save Time in Reading Comprehension appeared first on 91Èȱ¬ Blog.

Divide and Rule

The bigger the better does not hold well with RC passages, especially when they are loaded with a difficult vocabulary. When you look at a passage, you should understand that a paragraph is a flow of ideas presented to you by the author in a logical sequence. The mantra is to break a long paragraph into those meaningful fragments mentally and then try to decipher the underlying meaning of each and every part. One thing to note here is, if you have a good knowledge of punctuation and conjunctions, you definitely are at an edge over others. The art of comprehending a paragraph is most of the times a game of punctuation, conjunctions, and vocabulary. Once divided into smaller parts, you can extract individual ideas… and then comes the most important part: to relate different ideas and form an overall understanding of the paragraph.

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What is the question?

If you thought understanding a passage is all you need to do, well not really! You also need to understand the type of questions asked: main-idea, vocabulary based, conclusion based or support the argument. Every type needs a different approach to answer. If you ask me how? Well, let us say the question is a simple ‘replace the sentence from the passage with a suitable word’; for this you need to be really good with your vocabulary! For understanding the central idea, you will have to dig deeper into each and every paragraph and read the passage from the author’s perspective and not your own! The conclusion based questions, on the other hand would test your understanding of the paragraph and will take much of your time. To cut it short, you need to identify which type of questions you are most comfortable and accurate with and then try to focus on the questions where you are not good at. But, in the end if you think a particular question is taking more time than expected you can always skip to the next one! Yes, that’s the benefit of sectional adaptive in 91Èȱ¬ (but, that does not mean that you skip every other difficult question!).

Need for Speed.

Good news for those of you who do a good amount of reading every day! You would definitely have a better pace to read and comprehend. But is that enough? Along with the rate at which you read content what is also important is to understand the flow of ideas in that content! Needless to say a better grip over vocabulary will give you a stronger tool to fight RC. You also need to identify which type of question you encounter and accordingly decide how much time you need to put into answering it. Let me give you an example, if the question is a simple vocabulary based it should take the least time while the conclusion based questions would take you the longest. Every other type will fall somewhere in between. So I would suggest you to keep on identifying the questions and the average time spent on each type of question as you practice RC passages. ETS provides a number of RC passages to practice and at the same time you can practice with 91Èȱ¬edge where you can get a detailed feedback after every practice session. So until you master RC, keep on practicing!

In fact, if you have more queries particularly regarding 91Èȱ¬ Reading Comprehensions, please post your question/doubt as comments below. Our Verbal Experts will get back to you and provide all possible assistance.

Happy Learning with 91Èȱ¬!

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