**** Verbal Reasoning - Should I bother??

[daleader]

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Hello,

I was hoping to get your input regarding a situation. If you have 8-9 months to study, and you CAN put in around 20-25 hours / week, how would you approach VERBAL reasoning. Would you go straight to MCAT stuff (like EK101, TPR VR) and practice as much as you can or would you start reading in general - like newspapers/books/review before tackling the MCAT Verbal books? --

MCAT VERBAL without practice right now: 6
Goal is to get 10 or 11.

Please help, I really need to know what you guys think. Tackle real stuff from the beginning, or start getting into reading habits before tackling MCAT ?


THANKSSSS 🙂

 

[FeinMS]

Start reading something else.

 

[daleader]

Thanks for your reply. Could you be more specific? Do you think anything in general is good or specifically focus on one type of literature? ..so I should start with MCAT verbal books until closer to my test?

 

[Person0715]

Start by getting into the habit of reading. A source that's often cited is "The Economist."

 

[sakabato93]

Agreed with above posts. At this point (8-9 months in advance) its probably not to advantageous to use up your direct MCAT resources. A better alternative is to become acclimated to heavy reading, especially things that are social science and humanities heavy (I'm assuming through our current MCAT score that you're more of a natural science guy). There are multiple threads on this forum that suggest lots of different sources of reading material.

Wall Street Journal is good too.

 

[Selstaar]

The Atlantic is also pretty good.

 

[kmp0410]

Yes, just read. Improving your reading comprehension will help everywhere.

 

[FeinMS]

Read everything in the suggested materials (The Economist, The Atlantic, etc.) This includes those articles that interest you and those that disgust you.

 

[blackjack42]

I know this is completely the wrong thread for this, but I searched around and couldn't find a "right" one that was current. So I apologize in advance, but any help would be much appreciated!

For the EK 101 book, in the warm-up section, can someone explain why the answer for #9 couldn't be B? The explanation in the book italicizes a sentence from the passage that exactly supports the question. So confused :/

 

[gettheleadout]

I know this is completely the wrong thread for this, but I searched around and couldn't find a "right" one that was current. So I apologize in advance, but any help would be much appreciated!

For the EK 101 book, in the warm-up section, can someone explain why the answer for #9 couldn't be B? The explanation in the book italicizes a sentence from the passage that exactly supports the question. So confused :/

Might try a thread in the Q&A forum for more responses. 🙂

 

[blackjack42]

Might try a thread in the Q&A forum for more responses. 🙂

Thanks! I'll do that 🙂

 

[Zod]

Read a lot of imaginative poetry and make sure you can understand everything by the time you finish reading an item (include diction, what the author is trying to show you, etc.).
Then start reading articles in the humanities, social sciences, as well as basic/hard sciences.
LSAT stuff will have a lot of practice for the Verbal since same company makes their exams and they also have Verbal type testing.
GL

 

[daleader]

Great thanks a lot guys ! It seems like you all agree that I shouldn't start with MCAT prep stuff yet.

I heard that newspapers may not be as useful as heavy humanities/social sciences text, any suggestion where I could find texts on humanities/social sciences that might help?

Thanks !!

 

[daleader]

Thanks !! One thing you pointed out that I really liked is LSAT, does anyone else agree that maybe instead of reading newspapers / articles, focusing on LSAT prep might help better?

The problem with general readings is that HOW do I know if I got what the author meant 100%? But if I practice for LSAT for instance, I can use prep books and know how I'm doing? Do you agree that it would be hard to know how good I am doing if I just rely on general articles?

Thanks!!

 

[superq460]

LSAT could be good to an extent, but ultimately it's still a different test, and there would be subtle differences in the questions as well.

The advice behind telling you to simply read articles from the Economist or the Atlantic is to get you comfortable reading articles that are about the same difficulty as those found on the MCAT. Once you get to a certain level of comfort, then you will begin to understand the main focus of MCAT passages, which will help improve your score.

If you hate passages on social science or history, then keep on reading these passages so that you develop a comfort with them and perhaps even become more interested about the subject. Once you have that covered, it's a matter of practice and getting used to the questions that the MCAT asks.

Developing this comfort with unfamiliar topics helped me a lot. I was getting anything between a 6-9, but I eventually got more consistent scores from 9-11 after doing more reading.