Friday, December 10, 2010

Speed

1. To speed up answering questions as well as reading/mapping verbal passages, you had mention in Verbal III to practice 3 techniques. One you had said was to read/map 2 passages a day. What were the other suggestions you had made or would make?

2. For the writing sample, you had suggested 3 sentences which would ensure (although not eloquently) that we had covered the three tasks for answering the writing sample prompt. What were they and were these intended to be the topic sentences for each of the paragraphs?
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1.  Three suggestions for speeding up verbal:
-Read two passages EVERY day
-Do the Optimization Exercise:  read a passage, taking as long as you want to understand everything and answer the questions.  Read another passage (skim) in two minutes, and answer the questions.  You'll see that you do similarly on the two passages.  The goal of this exercise is to PROVE that you don't need to obsessively read on Test Day and that you need to train yourself to avoid doing so.
-Take a few passages and read the first sentence.  Afterwards, ask yourself some questions:  did I get what I read?  If not, does that matter?  Where is the author going to go?  Will that matter?  How do I know where they're going?  Ask yourself these same questions after every sentence.  The goal here is to practice critical reading.

2.  The three sentences you can automatically use are:
Task 1:  "This statement means that ______"
Task 2:  "There are times this statement doesn't apply.  For example, ______."
Task 3:  "What determines when [Task 1] and when [Task 2] is ______."
These can act as opening sentences for each paragraph.

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