| Tips & Tricks Vol. 1 |
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There are several things that you have to keep in mind:
a ) Differentiate between speed and hurry: Many students think that speed means making guesses and blundering on. This is wrong. Do the questions with concentration. Don’t worry about questions you could not attempt, because you possibly cannot do 180 questions in two hours. Speed means avoiding unnecessary calculations.☛ Hot tip: Allow yourself 30 seconds to glance over the section before starting. This will help you locate the easy questions. b) Keep your cool. There will be some difficult questions and some easy ones. When you hit the difficult ones, you must stay calm. Skip a few questions. Don’t panic, because if you do, you have almost certainly lost the battle. ☛ Hot tip: If you become tense, just close your eyes and take a few deep breaths. Return to the paper once you are composed again. c) Manage your time: Keep a watch before you. Write down the time when you should move over to the new section. Don’t be tempted to stick to the previous section when the time is over. Just keep moving on. ☛ Hot tip: Each section should be attempted in 28 minutes. Allow yourself 2 minutes to go back on questions you could not solve, or for making some intelligent guesses. COMPREHENSION ☛ Tips for speed reading Next time you are reading a paper, try this. First stage: Sweep your hand from left to right across the page so your finger underlines each line. Follow your finger with your eyes. The difficulty of the material determines the speed, but move your hand a little faster than your eye can follow comfortably. Make your eyes work to keep up. Soon you will find yourself reading whole phrases and ideas. As it gets easier, keep increasing the speed. As you improve, instead of sweeping whole lines with your finger, just sweep the middle part. Your eyes will scan the beginning and the end of the line automatically. When you’ve mastered this, your reading speed will be between 500 and 1,000 words per minute. This is the practical limit. Second Stage: The next speed increase comes from area reading. Instead of sweeping lines, use broader hand motions to make a series of zigzags of S’s down the page and read several lines at once. You can even read backward as your hand moves to the left. You’ll comprehend very little at first, but if you keep your eyes following your finger, you’ll find yourself absorbing whole chunks of the page at once. Six hot tips for comprehension:
Read the editorial page of one good English newspaper everyday by the above method. This should not take more than 15 minutes everyday. Make it a point to read the economic articles and business news. Look up difficult words that you encounter in a dictionary. Also read a magazine on current affairs. This will help you form your opinions and increase your awareness. A number of people who have cleared GMAT have told us that the magazine was priceless for their preparation. Additional reading and exercises: Norman Lewis: How to Read Better and Faster. VERBAL ABILITY It is important to have a good vocabulary, know good grammar and again, have the reading habit. Vocabulary: A good vocabulary is built up over time. Reading helps. Check up important words in a dictionary. Or take a good word-list, such as the one published in Master Guide for MBA Entrance, and learn the usage of the words. Knowing about 3 roots of words helps. ☛ Hot tip: The best way to learn a word list is through vocabulary cards. Making them is an investment, because they will be helpful over a period of time. Analogies, Odd man out: This means finding relations among words. What is the relation between SALT : SALTY? We can say that salty things contain salt. The best choice would be COW : BOVINE, because that best suits the relationship. A good vocabulary helps in such questions. ☛ Hot tip: Do as many analogies as you can, to know the kind of relations that can be asked. If you do it every month, you will have a good understanding of analogies. Arranging sentences, blanks: These are tricky, especially if they contain large sentences. The selections are usually from current newspapers, so extra reading increases speed in such questions. ☛ Hot tip: Usually, the answer can be obtained by getting at the central idea and thinking what it should start or end with, or by working from the choices. Do not waste time arranging the entire paragraph. ------- |
