MeowMix said:
Peterson's MCAT prep books are not realistic VR practice; the techniques that work well on their tests may not work very well on the MCAT. I'd suggest that you invest in the AAMC full-lengths and use those VR sections as a guide. I particularly recommend the brain-numbing Picasso passage from AAMC 5 and the Confucius/li passage from AAMC 3 (I think those are the right test numbers).
Yeah, I have to do the AAMC stuff sometime... but honestly, its common sense: you can't understand something unless you read it? Consider, for example, the topic sentence isn't always the first sentence... it could be the 4th, 5th, or 6th sentence of a paragraph. I say this, coz' for any reading test, theres usually a question about the main idea of a passage. Then theres usually a "which of the following is NOT true" question.
Lets take an example passage. Imagine the passage was about Mother Teresa's character. The intro is as follows:
"Mother Teresa is known to many as a saint, but underneath the veil of generosity lay a complex persona magnified by many extremes, including a deceptive side, hardly known to the world at large. Only recently have details emerged about the "unmotherlike" Teresa, details which, to the scrupulous eye, exemplify not the hallmarks of virtue, but the doings of a desperate, bitter woman, who was nevertheless able to conceal her untoward improprieties from the public eye, with astonishing success."
Okay, lets say you look at the first question, which says: "the main idea of the passage is that during her lifetime, Mother Teresa was..." One of the four answer choices, says this: "Untarnished reputation-wise, nevertheless prone to personal insecurity." Another one says: "tarnished reputation-wise." A third one says, "Tarnished reputation-wise, yet not at all prone to personal insecurity." And the fourth answer choice says, "none of the above." By reading the first paragraph, you know - according to the author - she has an untarnished reputation. But do you really know that her behavior showed signs of personal insecurity? The word "desperation" just barely implies that. But you CAN'T be sure unless the second, third, or fourth paragraphs actually validates that point. Which makes (d), a possibly wrong answer, quite tempting. Now imagine you had a question like, "According to the passage, when it came to her ultimate mission, helping the poor, Mother Teresa was: (A)Steadfast, and yet yielding"... (b) "steadfast and unyielding..." (c) "not steadfast but yielding" (d) "neither steadfast nor unyielding." The first paragraph will definitely NOT answer this. With this question, the person writing the passage can just have one or two lines, to conclude the entire passage (pretend its lines 204 & 205), where he says, "It is truly astonishing that she never let her secret life affect her attitude or relationships with the poor. Indeed, had this indiscreetness of hers been otherwise, everything from Nobel acclamation to beatifcation might well have been a pipe dream." You would certainly NOT know this by skimming the first paragraph. Or the second. Or the third. Or the fourth. In fact, the author of the passage doesn't have to mention anywhere in the passage except in the last two lines that Mother Teresa was steadfast and unyielding in her ultimate mission. You'd have to be very lucky to skim down all the way to the last passage - assuming you're skimming - to get the right answer. And finally, a question like this: "which of the following is not true, according to the passage: (a) Mother Teresa's ability to hide her darker side from the public eye may have contributed to her winning a Nobel Prize eventually. (b) Most of Mother Teresa's improprieties were unknown to the public eye. (c) Most of Mother Teresa's improprieties were uknown to the public eye, yet had no bearing on her winning a Nobel Prize. (d) Mother Teresa's improprieties were reflected in her often erractic behavior. In this case, (a) is mentioned only mentioned once in the passage, which if you've read you can eliminate fairly easily. (b) can also be eliminated easily. (c) relates to (a); notice here how unhelpful skimming is. The first part of (c) is mentioned in the intro, and the last part is given in the last two lines of the whole passage. (d) can be eliminated after reading the first passage. Incidentally, (c) is the right answer.
Note: The passage here is totally made up by me. So plz hold off on the lawsuits, if ur Kaplan or whoever.
