What do you do about passages that you have no hope of understanding

  • Thread starter Thread starter deleted647690
  • Start date Start date
This forum made possible through the generous support of SDN members, donors, and sponsors. Thank you.
D

deleted647690

What is the best strategy when under timed conditions for these? Especially philosophy type passages, I just had a lot of trouble with the second passage in practice exam 1 or TPRH. I spent too much time reading over sentences slowly to try and understand them. I think that even given unlimited time, it would have been very difficult for me to understand the passage.

And it doesn't help that I start to panic when I realize how much time I'm wasting
Members don't see this ad.
 
Sort by date Sort by votes
I write in the column of my scratch paper - this paragraph = ... and move on.... Even if I'm wrong, at least I know where to look when I get to the questions. Philosophy passages are predominantly, in my op, meant to do exactly what they are doing to you: induce panic, slow you down; don't let them; pick it and quit it; move on and be done.

If you do enough practice tests, you start to see the same types of questions on the same types of passages: philosophy asks this, history asks this, arts ask this...see the pattern; it will help you (maybe?) when you see something similar again. it's what i'm doing... because I hate philosophy (and I minored in it,somehow... I blame drinking; lots and lots and lots of drinking)
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
To further add to what Ad2b has said, when you do a lot of passages and review them you start to be able to pick out important information in the passages. The truth is that while the topic changes the general structure of the passage stays the same. The author is usually arguing or describing something and along the way he presents information to support what he is saying (also argue against something, and certain clarifications). Some very intelligent individuals on this forum will tell you that you don't need background knowledge and that all the information is in the passage. But for people such as myself I found that learning the basic vocabulary helped me tremendously in being able to follow what the passage was saying.

tl;dr - do more passages and review them brah
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Take a deep breath. Pause for a second and try to remove all thoughts from your head. Then read the author and try to critique him internally. Try to understand what he is trying to say. Try to relate examples given by the author to things you can relate to. Overall try to create an image of the author and his view and have an internal conversation about what he is talking about. Example: "Oh I understand what the author means about Aristotle and "the Good" this guy thinks Aristotle was overthinking and tripping and was a hypocrite and that "the Good" is just an ideology for modern Philosopher's to promote their laziness." I totally just made that up but reading proactively and constructing language you can better relate to really will help reading those passages. I can totally relate. Also if those philosophy and lit passages really get you then maybe go through TPRH verbal book and do all those passages.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Members don't see this ad :)
Anything extra will help; it's all about seeing their patterns - how they ask questions and moreover, how they justify the answer choice.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Everything said above is good advice, but there are times that no matter how much analyzing and practice you do, you can't get a particular passage if your life depended on it. I can't speak for other people, but this was the case for me. CARS just kicked my @ss on the MCAT. When I see these type of passages, I just skip them and come back to them at the end. I feel like the 10 minutes spent staring at a confusing passage is better spent solidifying my answers on an easier one. I find that my probability of succeeding with these hard passages after dedicating more time to them was pretty low, but if there is a passage where I was 70% sure of the answers, I usually got the questions of that easier passage right by shifting that time over to them.

When it comes to post-practice exam analysis, I didn't spend too much time analyzing things that I could barely figure out while taking the test. I figured that time was better spent on the things that I kinda knew what was going wrong but missed some question. My strategy might not work for everyone, but it is what it is. I got a better score than I anticipated on the real thing (not so much CARS), so you can take my advice with a grain of salt.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
alpha-GTP said:
Everything said above is good advice, but there are times that no matter how much analyzing and practice you do, you can't get a particular passage if your life depended on it. I can't speak for other people, but this was the case for me. CARS just kicked my @ss on the MCAT. When I see these type of passages, I just skip them and come back to them at the end. I feel like the 10 minutes spent staring at a confusing passage is better spent solidifying my answers on an easier one. I find that my probability of succeeding with these hard passages after dedicating more time to them was pretty low, but if there is a passage where I was 70% sure of the answers, I usually got the questions of that easier passage right by shifting that time over to them.
Click to expand...

+1

As soon as I realized I was not going to be able to figure out a passage, I skipped it. The less time you waste before skipping, the better. Finish the rest of the section and come back. It's more important to take time and get the questions right that you "should be able to get", and not spend 20 minutes on a passage to still get questions wrong. When you come back at the end, you can do a better job budgeting your time knowing that you've already gotten the bulk of the points for the section.

Also, perhaps most importantly, you can't get flustered by these passages. Know that everyone else will be struggling with that passage too, and getting questions wrong on it won't be a big deal. Letting difficult passages break your concentration and screw with your head will be much more damaging to your overall score than getting a handful of questions wrong that 80% of test takers also got wrong.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
2 things:

1. Try and get the main gist of the passage, you don't need to understand details, just the main idea
2. Try to get the tone of the writer. This will help in conjunction with point #1

Honestly if you can get these two things for every passage then you will do well on CARS. Many questions are based just off the main idea and too many people try and understand the details.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top