Thats awesome! What do you mean by pick apart the questions/answers? What is your thought process?
I don't want to sound like an advertisement for EK, but I really liked how they described it in their verbal/math book. They make you do a few sets of questions without the passages to show you how much info is actually contained in the questions and their answer choices.
For questions that ask you which would weaken the author's claim that X is true, you now know that the author thinks that X is true. If you have TPRH verbal, look at passage 7 questions 6 and 7 (2010 edition), those two questions tell you 2 of the author's key arguments right away.
Look at the choices for question 6 ("Which of the following...away from polytheism?"), B clearly strengthens the question statement, cross it out. Note that C appears to cause B to occur (more magic cults would be monotheistic if it was shown that Zeus made people obey laws), can't have 2 right answers, so C must be wrong. Already without any info from the passage, you know the answer is A or D. If you read D closely, you see a contradiction between the idea of enclosing a variety of personalities and the move from polytheism (isn't enclosing a variety of personalities actually a reason for polytheism?). Choice A is kind of vague and although I couldn't think of a reason to cross it out it feels like a trap. As another example, look at question 3 without any knowledge from the passage, 2 answers contradict each other so one of them must be right. Look at the other 2 answer choices to see which one they align with and you've got your answer.
You'll usually find that there's an answer that seems obviously correct, you have to learn to avoid this one as it's usually too vague or is pulled verbatim from the passage without answering the question.
When a question starts with "According to the passage...", I usually head back to that part of the passage and skim for key words. I've found that this type of question is the one type where a directly quoted answer from the passage can be correct.
I would highly recommend spending some time reading through the verbal section in the EK book, I was treating it like a tricky detail-oriented section before and EK helped change that.
O Grady, I'm about to send you a PM too.
ETA: I've found that the EK books usually have an answer that your gut disagrees with but you can't prove wrong for sure. Trust your gut on those one and go for something else.
Man today is just not my day...scored 60% on the 2/3 of both G-chem and physics chapter 4.
