How to CRUSH Reading Comprehension: 3 Effective Strategies to Ace RC [+worked example!]

the first thing you should know about reading comprehension is that the battle starts in your mind I always see students look a big chunk of text and I bet the first thought that's going on in their minds is oh my god I just don't care about frogs or about 17th century politicians this is boring people often don't enjoy reading convention and they just want to get it over with and get to the end of the passage as quickly as possible but as someone fortunate enough to have gotten a perfect score in the verbal sections of both the GRE and the GMAT I have three main methods to help you crush the reading comprehension section but I warn you my advice is different from what you might read elsewhere especially the second and third methods might be a little bit controversial but what can I say they've worked for me and so I'm just gonna let you know these methods and you can decide if they're gonna work for you first things first you're going to need to dismiss those negative thoughts immediately at some point in those first five seconds when you see that big reading comprehension passage you're going to get a signal from your brain that says something like I don't need this information this is boring this has nothing to do with my life and if you let that signal permeate your brain your brain is not going to really analyze the text or remember it or process it in any way instead you need to intercept that signal and say to your brain no this might be interesting I'm gonna learn something from this I may be able to tell my friends or my family about something I learn here this is a way of persuading your brain that the information it's reading is useful and not the liter and that's a big secret for memorizing information if your brain is not persuaded that the information is critical it won't remember it it will just delete it as you go along and that's why so many students get to the end of a passage and they just say to me I don't actually remember anything I just read whereas that never happens to me when I get to the end of a passage I pretty much retain the tone the argument that complete of what I read and how do I do it well in those first five seconds i intercepted the signal and i said no this piece about art this piece about a 15th century politician this piece about slavery no I'm gonna find it interesting I'm gonna learn something here I'm gonna tell people about what I've read this is not boring this might be interesting and suddenly my brain is thinking about the text in a very different way at the end of this video I'm gonna do a full worked example of how to tackle a reading comprehension question but for now you could ask yourself has that happened to you have you got to the end of a passage and just thought I didn't retain a single word well if that's you then this first method could really help the same thing applies to reading outside of a test by the way whether it be articles or essays or books you shouldn't think of reading as like some sort of-- that you have to do it's an amazing opportunity to gain a different perspective on life and honestly when I was thinking about making this video I thought about if I trace the origins of many of the turning points in my life it's often come down to an essay that I've read or an article that I've read or a book that I've read and without reading my life would be quite different so what I'm saying is you're not lying to your brain when you say this information might be really interesting and really important it genuinely might be so how do I do that use your imagination to make the word stick it's all about critical engagement as you're reading say things to yourself like oh I never knew that or I don't agree with that that sounds crazy or wow that's really interesting I'm gonna tell person X about that obviously we don't say these things out loud because then would be a crazy person but you can't speak out loud in the test but you can say these things to yourself in your head like wow that's really interesting this means agreeing with a text disagreeing with the text replying to the text predicting the text anything that you can do to force your brain to engage with it don't just read it silently like you know mmm no you read it like oh wow interesting hmm I didn't know that that doesn't sound right Wow heard of this person stuff like that all of that helps to persuade your brain wow this is something really interesting the more you can store intuitively in your brain from understanding what's going on the less you're gonna have to keep looking back to the passage and you could just answer the questions people talk about skimming the passage but I only use that as a last resort because when you skim you tend to only pick up the most obvious points in the text and usually at least the medium or high level the exam is going to be testing the subtleties of the argument and the conclusion not the most obvious point so dismiss the negative thoughts and engage critically with the text that's my method number one time for Method number two read more slowly that means reading more slowly than you read your Twitter feed or YouTube comments or your whatsapp messages it means reading calmly and carefully now I know what you're thinking if you read at that speed it's gonna take way too long the truth is it actually doesn't if you read calmly and carefully you actually get through a text relatively quickly and you don't have to keep rereading because you're understanding it as you go along more importantly when you get to the questions you'll be able to answer much more quickly and confidently because you actually understand what's going on as opposed to having to constantly go back to the text and weary bits I often say to students my aim is to be the slowest person in the room to read the passage but then the quickest person in the room to answer the questions and to do that you need to read more slowly less haste more speed now people tend to ask me oh but should I read the question first or the passage first I've tried both approaches and I honestly don't think one's much better than the other what's much more important in reading at a deliberate pace the same by the way goes for reading articles and essays and books in real life your goal is not just just accumulate a list of articles that you've read or books that you've read your goal is to change your perspective life and only by engaging critically and reading more deliberately to understand what's going on are you going to achieve that aim this is why I tend to read longer form journalism and essays and nonfiction books and I tend to stay away from social media except from YouTube because I want to feed my brain long deliberate interesting text I can take more time and think more about what I'm reading rather than just react to everything going back to the test I also don't tend to take notes some students do and I'm not saying it's really bad to take notes but it takes time and because I'm reading slowly I don't have that extra time to take notes and also because I'm reading slowly I don't really need to take notes I retain the tone the argument and the conclusion in my head also something I've noticed is that the people who do rhinos tend not to look back at their notes too often and when they do they don't really get much from them so I'm not quite sure what the benefit is but if it really works for you that's fine you can stick with it but for me no don't need notes with the exception obviously in real life of when I'm reading a book outside of an exam in which case I take like pages of notes often in my phone to squeeze out the juice of what I've learned now for me I was able to read slowly and still answer all the questions correctly for example in the GRE verbal section to get the 170 but I can understand that if English is not your native language reading slower is going to take more time than we have and that's why you're going to have to balance that by being slightly quicker in the sentence sections of the exam to catch up a bit on time but even if it means guessing the hardest question elsewhere is far better to answer most of the passages confidently and correctly than answer all the passages hastily and haphazardly before I get to that worked example from the ETS website of reading comprehension what is my third method my third method is to stop and sum so every sentence or two I stopped and I summarize what I read in my head quite quickly if I don't understand I reread there's no point in carrying on if you haven't understood a key bit of the text that you've already read that'll just lead to confusion and you won't quite understand what's going on so at the end of every sentence or maybe every couple of short sentences stop and just check you understand what the author is saying you can summarize in your head like a little synopsis of what happened so far again it's easy to persuade yourself that you're understanding it and you just keep reading but then you gets the end of a paragraph and if I ask you to summarize it you would be like I have no idea what's going on that's probably because you didn't stop and summarize every sentence to check that you are understanding what was going on the examiners know which sentences are the most complicated and those are likely to be the ones that they have questions on they're going to try and tempt you to just glaze over that complex sentence but your job is to identify that really complex sentence and stop and we read it if necessary sunrise to yourself what happened in that sentence and what it means again we buy back time because we're answering the questions more quickly and confidently some of you at this point are understandably thinking but what if I can't understand the sentence even with rereading this could be because the syntax or structure of the sentence is just really baffling or there's a keyword or two that you just don't understand and there's only two long-term solutions to that problem the first is to just read more things like The Economist New York Times The Guardian nonfiction books that can help get you more familiar with complex sentences what they sound like and what they mean and of course with vocabulary I've done a couple of other videos on this so please check them out but the main answer with vocabulary is to always look up any word you don't understand that's the number one way to max out your vocabulary over a short period is to never let a single word that you don't understand go without looking up and committing it to memory again I've done a couple of other videos on how to memorize vocabulary so please do check those out I think that's enough build-up it's time to bring that all together in a worked example this time for the GRE but the same advice applies to TOEFL and the GMAT reading comprehension sections if you feel you have learned anything from the video so far please do leave a like leave a comment leave a question of course subscribe all of that helps to boost the video on the YouTube algorithm and that of course leads to more people seeing this content and to all of my existing 333 subscribers thank you for your kind comments and thank you for your loyalty by the way this video was requested by Alicia pervy Praveen digest and s Rao so thank you for those suggestions and again if you have comments on what other videos I should do please leave those down below this video would be far too long if I covered every single question type in reading comprehension so if there's enough demand I will do separate videos in the future on specific individual question types I am gonna time myself for this but in general in the exam I don't really look at the clock so I'm just gonna get straight into it this seems to be about music okay reviving the practice of using elements of popular music in classical composition an approach that had been in hibernation in the u.s. during the 1960s so they didn't do this in the 60s they didn't use pop in classics composer Philip Glass embraced the ethos of pop music in his compositions he loved it glass based two symphonies on music by rock musicians Barry and Ino but the symphony sound is distinctively his original to him cool popular elements do not appear out of place in glasses classical music which from its early days has shared certain harmonies and rhythms with rock music so for a long time he's mixed pop and rock amazing yet this use of pop elements has not made glass a composer of pop so he doesn't compose pop his music is not a version of pop music packaged to attract classical listeners what is it it is high art for listeners steeped in rock rather than the classics so it's an amazing fusion of rock and the classics okay I'm more or less understanding what's going on let's get to the question all the questions I think select only one arts Joyce the passage addresses which of the following issues related to glasses use of pop elements in his classical compositions so using pop in classical music how it was regarded by listeners who prefer walk to the classics maybe but I don't really think it talks about people who prefer rock over the classics I don't remember that how it is affected how it has affected sorry the commercial success no we never we never talk about commercial success I don't remember that so you try and answer along with me whether it has contributed to a revival of interest among other composers other composers I'm pretty short and never talked about other composers whether it has had a detrimental effect pop music has had a detrimental effect on glasses reputation no it never said that his reputation had gone down anything like that so it has to be II unless I've made a mistake whether it has caused certain of his works to be derivative derivative means non original and there was definitely somewhere in the middle of the passage something about whether the work was like distinctively his or something just by elimination to be honest we can get dizzy I'm like 95% or Lizzie consider each of the three honest choices and a select all that apply the passage suggests that glasses work displays which of the following qualities a return to the use of pop music in classical compositions definitely I returned because did in the first sentence say something about a revival of using pop and classic together so a revival is kind of like a return so I'm gonna go a yes and attempt to elevate what music elevate rock music to an artistic status more closely approximating it just doesn't feel right because we're not comparing work with classical and saying one's as good as the other something just doesn't feel good b/c a long-standing tendency to incorporate elements from too apparently disparate musical styles yeah the whole passage is about incorporating elements from pop and classics so see pretty sure select the sentence that distinguishes two ways of integrating rock and classical so bringing together watt and classical in two different ways okay is it the first sentence vibration no doesn't talk about bringing them together in two ways that's who we based on no pop elements do not appear out of place mm oh that's not two methods of bringing it together that's just his history yeah this use of popular elements has not made him a composer that's not two methods so has to be this last sentence otherwise I am gonna get it wrong his music is not a version of pop so his music is not this a version of pop music package to attract a classical listeners it is this so that sounds white we're kind of comparing two different things and both sentences are kind of about to pop bang classic so I go with E now how long did I take I took just over five minutes on the timing obviously I could have gone a bit quicker but I wanted to demonstrate my approach and obviously by speaking out loud I slowed myself down a little bit so probably in the real test I'd be slightly faster than this but this gives you a really good insight into more or less how I approach these questions and also don't forget you are going to spend a bit more time on reading comprehension in the GRE and the GMAT then on the other sections of the verbal so we can afford to spend a bit longer than the minute and a half or two minutes per question that they give us because we can balance that out by being quicker and the sentence questions but here is the real question how did I do you're going to get the real results this is not unvarnished I'm not gonna edit this if I get it wrong question one was a boom that was fairly sure about that yeah the bit about the music being distinctively his so his work was not derivative okay you can pause and read the explanation I was gonna move on question two the correct answer was a and C which is what I said the middle bit about comparing the two of them I don't think was was right it was it so it was a and C and the correct answer is the last sentence yeah I was pretty sure on that one because that was the only one that kind of had two different methods of mixing the two together so there we go got them all right in more or less the right amount of time maybe a little bit slow because I was talking but that's roughly the speed you want to go out fairly slowly and notice how I was saying stuff like cool and interesting because I'm getting my brain to get excited about the passage and notice also that occasionally I would stop and summarize just to check that I was understanding what was going on and those are the methods I use to score perfectly in the reading comprehension thank you for watching and listen and I really hope that gave you a solid introduction in how to deal with reading comprehension and if possible even how to enjoy it again if you liked it please leave a like please leave a comment I read all of them and try to apply to almost all of them see you in the next video

Channel: The Tested Tutor

Views: 157,398

Keywords: Reading Comprehension Tips, how to improve reading comprehension, Reading comprehension questions, Reading comprehension help, how to do reading comprehension, TOEFL Reading Comprehension, GMAT Reading Comprehension, GRE Reading Comprehension, team lyqa, indySOW, Reading Comprehension in English, reading comprehension strategies, reading comprehension passage, Reading comprehension exams, Learn English Lab, Iris Reading, prepscholar gre, RC tips

Id: dPvWRYPadFg

Length: 20min 7sec (1207 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 01 2019