RC meaning/synonym and author's attitude question strategy

mshina90394

Hey all,

I've been gradually improving on RC over the last 10 PTs (-6 to -8) to (-3 to -5) by spending more time upfront understanding the passage content/structure/emphasis and less time wastefully deliberating over answer choices. Generally, I feel pretty efficient about how much time I spend on each question based on the question type and its respective difficulty.

However, I notice that for harder meaning/synonym and author's attitude questions, I find myself spending a longer period of time debating answer choices (~1 min+) than I should be (~30 sec). For author's attitude questions, I circle key words that reflect the author's opinion as I read the passage and write an A next to the longer parts of the author's opinion. For meaning/synonym questions, my strategy is to replace the word in the stimulus at its respective location with the answer choices and see if it fits.

Usually, 2-3 of the answer choices can be easily eliminated, but when the remaining two answer choices have the correct type of tone (i.e. both positive/negative) and only differ in degree, I end up spending way too much time debating between the two by looking at the passage for textual evidence and eventually end up going with my gut. I know JY's advice for difficult RC questions is to cut your losses, go with you gut, and rack up points on easier questions, but I feel like there's a better way to approach these questions more confidently to minimize time spent and improve accuracy.

How do you guys approach these question types?