Reading Comprehension TIPS!

[miravyn]

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I'm going over the Kaplan blue book. Can anyone give me some tips for the reading comp section. I just don't understand how someone can read such long passage and still answer 50 questions in 50 minutes. People don't really complain about this section so I suppose you guys don't have a hard time with it.

 

[pbure]

I'm going over the Kaplan blue book. Can anyone give me some tips for the reading comp section. I just don't understand how someone can read such long passage and still answer 50 questions in 50 minutes. People don't really complain about this section so I suppose you guys don't have a hard time with it.

i think the best way is to read/skim the passages and don't stress out about memorizing details. get a good overall sense of what its about and then quickly jump to the questions. hopefully when you see the question you will remember which paragraph the answer is contained in. sometimes you will have general inference questions or main idea ones..that might be a bit tougher. if you slowly read through each passage then i am afraid you will most likely run out of time..

 

[shindrome]

here's how i approached it. when i took diagnostics i was scoring 12's 14's. i started by reading it first and trying to answer the questions. bad!!! well, during kaplan they tell you to read and take notes and then answer. i tried that and i was getting 14's still!! i was thinking how the hell do people do so well on this?? i asked a friend that took it and got a 22 and a lot of people will agree with me on this when i say that reading the questions FIRST does a world of a difference. it helps me by telling me what keyword of that question to look for. try that method and see if it works. my score's shot up to 19! also keep in mind that on the real test, you get 60 min to complete it! 10 min is a huge difference! it's awkward at first but you'll get the hang of searching for the answers. start by doing to the detail questions first and come back to the inference stuff later. let me know how this works. trust me, it's very do-able! i was scared stiff of this section at first too!

 

[ATX04UT]

Oh I'll complain about the RC section! It's not like the Kaplan stuff and Topscore...it's more critical thinking...make sure to pace yourself and have a game plan....the Topscore and Kaplan are easier than the actual DAT

 

[EVN3331]

This is coming from a guy who is not the fastest reader in the world and who still got a 21 on the section without ever practicing. I would recommend just skimming the passage first and then reading the questions. If I could not find the answer to the question within the first couple of minutes I just moved on and marked it. For more than half of the questions I marked I would find the answer to these questions while looking for the answers to the new questions, so I just went back and answered them. The answers are right in the passage too, just look for keywords as I don't remember anything being tricky in this section. Hope this helps.

 

[wimmcs]

This is coming from a guy who is not the fastest reader in the world and who still got a 21 on the section without ever practicing. I would recommend just skimming the passage first and then reading the questions. If I could not find the answer to the question within the first couple of minutes I just moved on and marked it. For more than half of the questions I marked I would find the answer to these questions while looking for the answers to the new questions, so I just went back and answered them. The answers are right in the passage too, just look for keywords as I don't remember anything being tricky in this section. Hope this helps.

Piggybacking to what evn said, yes, mark the ?s and then while looking for new ones, keep in mind the "key" word of the marked question and then you'll find it. Several times I marked my ?s and while looking for something else... there was the answer to the question I had marked previously. Actually English is my second language, so I really thought I would do badly in this section since I'm a very slow reader, but one thing that helped me was trying to keep confident that I could get a decent score. My score was a 19, nothing to brag about, but in I'm happy with it. One of my strategies was to read the first 2 to 3 paragraphs thoroughly and the last one as well.. I also read the first sentence in the rest of the paragraphs and this gave me a good idea of what the passage was about. Luckily I was able to remember where I had read a particular word, so being able to place key words in the paragraph was key to doing well. Keep practicing and I'm sure it will pay off. Good luck!

 

[LadyxJC]

I'll complain about the RC too... i think it's the most difficult section. I tried Kaplan's method, reading the questions first, skimming, jumping straight into the questions and looking for keywords in the passages from the questions. I got similar scores each time. I guess I'm just not a RC person... Anywayz... good luck~

 

[jdcinza13]

practice reading journal articles like the New England J of M, or abstracts of papers in the library. You can also go for newspapers like the Wall St. Journal. That will help you get in the habit of skimming/reading for content and main Idea.

 

[drusier]

and do not guess on anything make sure u find the exact sentence in the passage. They throw answers that you would think to guess but are distractors