<p>Hi everyone, I made this thread so that we can share our methods and learn from each other how to approach the CR section. What I want us to do is actually not just post general strategies that we follow like marking lines or playing devil's advocate, etc, but instead, I want to know how everyone TREATS some particular kinds of question or how to know whether a particular answer is right or wrong due to some reason, etc. please guys, I want this thread to be active. Thank you! Now let me start.
1- when I'm stuck between two seemingly correct answer, I immediately do one of two things: the first one is that I start to ask myself which one of the two answers is closer to the main idea of the passage and serves to illustrate what the author wants to say, in other words, " I put myself in the author's shoes and choose the answer that makes my argument." And the second one is that I have to be VERY LITERAL, and I mean by that I have to read the answer "word by word" and compare the answer with the passage. When doing so, I usually find that the answers are not as similar to each other as I thought.
2- For the long two-passages, I normally read one passage and answer questions related to that passage and keep questions related to both passages in the end. But what I found really helpful is that I look for questions that ask for the main topic for both passages or what both passages agree with and keep that question in mind, after doing so, I start reading passage 1 and answer questions related to it and after I finish reading the entire passage, I get back to the question and cross any choice that is not related to passage 1. That helps me pretty much because I would be able to cross multiple choices easily and confidently.</p>
<p>I recently jumped from 680-730s range to the high 700s to 800 range.</p>
<p>Here’s what I did:
- Before reading the passage, I always do the vocab questions first (these are the “most nearly” questions). Swap out all the choices until you get one that makes sense. DO NOT stop once you get to one that makes sense; there may be an even better choice.
- Circle ALL main idea questions. These are the questions that contain “the main purpose of the passage is…” Make it VERY conspicuous to yourself that you left a question behind. I usually draw a giant arrow to the question and write “DO THIS” in large letters. This fixed my problem of accidentally forgetting to do these questions.
- Find line reference questions. Go to the passage and bracket one sentence before the reference starts to one line after. I also write what the question is asking for next to the bracketed area. Stuff like “characterization” or “implies”.
- Read the rest of the questions. Don’t try to memorize them; just get a feel for what you should be reading for.
- Read the WHOLE passage. I can’t stress this enough. I basically quickly read through the passage, but once I get to a bracketed area, I slow down and start analyzing.
- Answer the questions! Eliminate all stupid answers. If you get down to two, don’t make a wild guess. Each answer HAS to be in the passage somewhere. If you can’t find evidence for the answer, it’s wrong, regardless of what your mind says. If you did a project on cheetahs, and you know that cheetahs are extremely fast, it doesn’t matter. If the author states “the cheetah is quite slow,” that’s what you mark.</p>