I feel like I have trouble reading RC fast because I’m trying to understand it. The passages be talking about bullshit sometimes so it’s hard for my brain to wrap around it. Any tips ?
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I feel like I have trouble reading RC fast because I’m trying to understand it. The passages be talking about bullshit sometimes so it’s hard for my brain to wrap around it. Any tips ?
4 comments
You don't. Take your time on the passages. Make sure you understand them. Even take brief notes if that helps you. I usually aim for 4 to 6 minutes on each of the passages. Then, if you did that work well, you'll be able to zoom through the questions with higher accuracy. It'll be a lot easier to catch the issues with answer choices making questions that used to take you a minute and a half only take 30 seconds. It's okay to reread. It's okay to take your time. You can still get a good score and guess on the last few questions of a section.
drill baby drill
You have to spend more time with the passage than you think. I spend about 4-5 minutes per passage and then fly through the questions. I make sure to only focus on the indiviudal paragraph and making sure I understand what its purpose and content was before I move on to the next paragraph. Additionally, I make sure to highlight structure and topic points in yellow, authors opinion and authors statements in pink, and then green and blue for counter statements/critiques opponent ideas.
The point isn't to read through the passages fast, but to read through them effectively. Make sure you highlight throughout the passage, whether it be conclusions, differing opinions/author's opinion, etc. Whatever you feel is important. How you get better at this is through practice. Also, I think that you shouldn't worry about reading RC as to understand the content - you should read it to understand the structure of the passage. To me that's the priority. Building a semblance of the structure of the passage in my head always helps me and helps me answer questions even when I don't understand what the passage is talking about (because sometimes there's really science-y passages where half the words I haven't seen before... in moments like this it's useless to try and digest it all, and you'll waste a lot of time trying to understand everything being said).