Manchas Wrote:
Hi Mike – thanks for the page references and for the game day tips. I plan on revisiting those again and again in the coming weeks. Also thanks to the previous poster’s questions and your responses, which have helped me as well. BTW, after some consideration, I’ve decided to hold onto my three chances and take the actual exam when I ‘m 110% on board with my readiness level. With that said, and if you have time, could you in a general way, address EITHER of two questions from the October exam of this year. They are both from the first LR section, #18 and #24. Seriously, in both instances, the elephant ( you know, the one you mention in the beginning chapters) completely took over and it felt like everything I learned in the last couple of months just fell out the window. Aside from moving on when encountering these types of quetison, can you tell me how to better “see” either of these questions. It felt almost like I had never seen anything quite like them before.
Hey Manchas — here you go – hope you don’t mind, but I’m going to uploading the solutions under separate topic headings (so that others can find them later) —
In terms of how those 2 q’s relate to one another, here’s what came to mind for me —
The typical LR q requires us to read through a stimulus, identify a conclusion, understand it exactly and “hold it” in our heads, dig through for the support, identify and understand that correctly, then match that up to the conclusion in order to carefully evaluation the reasoning relationship.
This is really hard, and requires us to use our brains at max capacity (for me at least) —
Notice how the two questions you brought up are both specifically designed to make it unusually challenging to do all of the above (see how the conclusions are split up in parts, etc.) —
That’s a huge part of what makes these problems so unusually difficult, and the ability to do all of the above better and better will be a big factor in your improvement —
And the great news is that through careful work you can strengthen your ability to perform all of these steps over time, and make it easier and easier on yourself to perform them successfully on even the hardest q’s —
Some tips for that —
First, just be aware of how important the reading issues are and how important it is for you to continue to get better and better at reading the stimulus as you should.
Second, recognize the importance of identifying the conclusion exactly and the support exactly — give yourself plenty of time to do this during problems, and think about how well you did this when you review your work.
Third, know that, as long as your fundamentals are sound, and you are getting more and more experience at taking the right steps (as opposed to learning wrong steps or running through a million different strategies without really getting to know them), the better and better your brain will get at the task, and the easier it will become —
I imagine you may already be focused on all that already, but that’s what came to mind for me — hth — mike