Reading Comprehension is often the most neglected part in the preparation of the Verbal section and often students find it boring to go through a piece of information that has no practical use for them. We have developed a way to go through the RC passages that not only will keep you awake while reading the passage, but also ensure that you get those questions based on the passage right.

How to read a passage:

Step 1: Identify the topic and the scope of the passage.

The topic of the passage is the first idea that you come across. Most of the times, you can find the idea in the first sentence itself.

Now identify the scope. The scope usually makes the boundary for the topic, an idea on which the author will focus for the rest of the passage. If you have identified the scope of the passage, you can easily strike off any answer choices that fall outside the scope of the passage.

For the passages that have only on paragraph, as a general rule, you can safely assume that the passage will generally narrow down on the scope in the first third of the passage.

Step 2: Get the gist of each paragraph and its role in the whole passage (Passage map)

After finding the topic of the passage, you have to ask yourself the following questions to understand the role of each of the subsequent paragraphs.

1. Why is this paragraph included?
2. What is the difference between the content of this paragraph and the one before?
3. How does this paragraph contribute to the main idea?
4. What is the role of the details, not what are the details.

Breaking down each paragraph like this is called a Passage map, which is arguably the best way to tackle an RC passage.

Another important thing to keep in mid while reading a passage is the usage of keywords. These words help you identify the transition or the continuation of an idea. Below is a list of the types of keyword used:

• Contrast Keywords: But, however, nonetheless, on the other hand. If you encounter these words, get ready to welcome a change or disagreement of the idea.
• Continuation: moreover, also, furthermore. These signify the continuation of the idea
• Evidence: since, because. These words give us the evidence of the existence of the idea
• Conclusion: therefore, hence. In simple words, these words indicate conclusion and may present a gist.
• Illustration: example, for instance. Again, these words support the idea
• Opinion: believe, theory, hypothesis. They can give the Opinion of the author or of someone else introduced in the passage.

Step 3: Details are important, but do not fret too much over them.

On the GMAT, you have a passage in front of you for a few minutes and then you are free to forget about that passage. You do not need to have a long term retention of the passage as you might not see anything related to the topic ever again. So focusing too much on the details more often than not proves to be counterproductive and takes away your precious time from you.

Furthermore, paying too much attention on the details can hurt your score in the following way:

1. Wastage of Time
2. Tempting Wrong Answers
3. Loose the bigger picture and the main idea.

To sum it up, follow the following steps to read the passage strategically:

• Identify the topic and the scope of the passage.
• Get the gist of each paragraph and its role in the whole passage (passage map)
• Details are important, but do not fret too much over them.

Till now, we have figured out a way to read the passage, now we will shift our attention towards finding the correct answer.

You can follow the following steps to arrive at the correct answer:

1. Read the passage strategically: Based on the above explanation, read the passage and make the passage map.
2. Analyze the question step: Identify what the question asks. Is it a detail question or a main idea question or a summary question? This identification will aid you answer finding and you can arrive at the answer much faster.
3. Research the relevant text: Once you have identified that the question is of the type of specific detail, the next step should be to go and look your passage map and identify the paragraph where it has been picked from and then identify the details. The best way is to read one line above and one line below the detail in the passage
4. Prethink the answer: As in the case of the CR questions, the inference question or the assumption question, prethink an answer based on your understanding of the topic and the scope of the passage and then verify your prethinking from the passage. This will help you save time and wil avoid your rummaging in the passage.
5. Evaluate the answer Choices: The authors usually set a trap of the half correct answer choices. Make sure you do not fall for the trap. You should make sure that the full text of the answer choice conforms with the idea of the passage.

Practice Passage: We have made the passage map for the first paragraph. In the sam way, make the map for the other two paragraphs and then try to answer the question that follows.

Passage:

The settlement of the United States has occupied traditional historians since 1893 when Frederick Jackson Turner developed his Frontier Thesis, a thesis that explained American development in terms of westward expansion. From the perspective of women’s history, Turner’s exclusively masculine assumptions constitute a major drawback: his defenders and critics alike have reconstructed men’s, not women’s, lives on the frontier. However, precisely because of this masculine orientation, revising the Frontier Thesis by focusing on women’s experience introduces new themes into women’s history—woman as lawmaker and entrepreneur—and, consequently, new interpretations of women’s relationship to capital, labor, andstatute.

Topic: How the US got settled down, how it got to where it is via expansion westward from the east coast to the west coast

Paragraph1:

• 1893 Jack Turner developed Frontier Thesis for American development.
• Drawback in assumptions
• New themes into women history

Turner claimed that the frontier produced the individualism that is the hallmark of American culture, and that this individualism in turn promoted democratic institutions and economic equality. He argued for the frontier as an agent of social change. Most novelists and historians writing in the early to midtwentieth century who considered women in the West, when they considered women at all, fell under Turner’s spell. In their works these authors tended to glorify women’s contributions to frontier life. Western women, in Turnerian tradition, were a fiercely independent, capable, and durable lot, free from the constraints binding their eastern sisters. This interpretation implied that the West provided a congenial environment where women could aspire to their own goals, free from constrictive stereotypes and sexist attitudes. In Turnerian terminology, the frontier had furnished “a gate of escape from the bondage of the past.”
By the middle of the twentieth century, the Frontier Thesis fell into disfavor among historians. Later, Reactionist writers took the view that frontier women were lonely, displaced persons in a hostile milieu that intensified the worst aspects of gender relations. The renaissance of the feminist movement during the 1970’s led to the Stasist school, which sidestepped the good bad dichotomy and argued that frontier women lived lives similar to the lives of women in the East. In one now-standard text, Faragher demonstrated the persistence of the “cult of true womanhood” and the illusionary quality of change on the westward journey. Recently the Stasist position has been revised but not entirely discounted by new research.

Question:

The primary purpose of the passage is to

(A) provide a framework within which the history of women in nineteenth-century America can be organized

(B) discuss divergent interpretations of women’s experience on the western frontier

(C) introduce a new hypothesis about women’s experience in nineteenth-century America

(D) advocate an empirical approach to women’s experience on the western frontier

(E) resolve ambiguities in several theories about women’s experience on the western frontier