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I am set on knocking out questions 1 minute max at a time. When I hit must be true questions in LR, especially with the long stimuli, it takes me like 3 minutes to dissect all the info. I find myself going through each answer choice and reading the stimulus over (which is a no-no). Does anybody have a quick and effective approach to these questions?

Must Be True = assumption questions?

incompetentia wrote:Must Be True = assumption questions?

No, not assumption...I might not be remembering it correctly but it's the question that gives you a bunch of facts and then the question stem is something like "If all of the above are true...which one of the following must be true?"

Sorry though, those also took me forever so I don't know if there's a faster way of doing it.

Oh, these. I don't seem to remember terribly many of these in more recent tests, but yeah, they were kind of annoying.
I don't know how much diagramming helps you, OP, but if the stimulus confused me at all I'd start drawing things out, and that seemed to help.

Strict logic -> diagram statements, conclusion and their contrapositives.

Regular premise must be true POE is the best way I think. It does take time though.

yeah, it just sucks, when I'm in a zone running into one of these almost always breaks my concentration.

SupraVln180 wrote:I am set on knocking out questions 1 minute max at a time.

I feel like that may be an unrealistic goal. Some questions are a lot harder than others. As long as your average time is low enough that you finish all the questions with time for bubbling, you're fine.

That said, diagramming the conditionals and contrapositives definitely helped me on those questions too.

think to yourself what must be true , answer, profit

SupraVln180 wrote:yeah, it just sucks, when I'm in a zone running into one of these almost always breaks my concentration.

Skip them. Come back to them at the end. I think this is helpful because the "must be true" questions (or "inference" questions, as I call them) require a fundamentally different procedure from the other question types. For most of the questions (i.e., strengthen, weaken, flaw, assumption, etc.) you need to identify the conclusion and the flaw of the argument. I find it difficult to change gears when I get to an inference, so I do them all together after I've completed everything else. Inference questions usually entail logical deductions, so I treat them like mini game. I try to internalize the statements, diagram them if I need to, and determine what else I can deduce by combining those statements. The answer is usually some articulation of the deduction. However, there are some inference questions where the correct answer is merely a paraphrase of one of the statements in the argument. If the statements don't seem to be interrelated, then I start looking for an obscure paraphrase of something that was given in the argument.

emseeaych wrote:

SupraVln180 wrote:I am set on knocking out questions 1 minute max at a time.

I feel like that may be an unrealistic goal. Some questions are a lot harder than others. As long as your average time is low enough that you finish all the questions with time for bubbling, you're fine.

That said, diagramming the conditionals and contrapositives definitely helped me on those questions too.

That's not my goal, thats what I do currently, I'm just saying that these Type 1 questions break my stride so to speak. I like to always have time at the end to check over everything, that's why I am so set on this. Then again, I only got a 163 on the October test and missed 14 on LR combined and only 5 on RC and LG combined. So there may be a problem with my approach to LR.

JazzOne wrote:

SupraVln180 wrote:yeah, it just sucks, when I'm in a zone running into one of these almost always breaks my concentration.

Skip them. Come back to them at the end. I think this is helpful because the "must be true" questions (or "inference" questions, as I call them) require a fundamentally different procedure from the other question types. For most of the questions (i.e., strengthen, weaken, flaw, assumption, etc.) you need to identify the conclusion and the flaw of the argument. I find it difficult to change gears when I get to an inference, so I do them all together after I've completed everything else. Inference questions usually entail logical deductions, so I treat them like mini game. I try to internalize the statements, diagram them if I need to, and determine what else I can deduce by combining those statements. The answer is usually some articulation of the deduction. However, there are some inference questions where the correct answer is merely a paraphrase of one of the statements in the argument. If the statements don't seem to be interrelated, then I start looking for an obscure paraphrase of something that was given in the argument.

I will give this approach a shot. It does help get in the mindset when you can group a difficult question type together and just knock them out at the end in one shot.

SupraVln180 wrote:That's not my goal, thats what I do currently, I'm just saying that these Type 1 questions break my stride so to speak. I like to always have time at the end to check over everything, that's why I am so set on this. Then again, I only got a 163 on the October test and missed 14 on LR combined and only 5 on RC and LG combined. So there may be a problem with my approach to LR.

Do you really finish the LR section in 25-26 minutes? Why would you go so fast unless you were consistently getting them all right?

suspicious android wrote:

SupraVln180 wrote:That's not my goal, thats what I do currently, I'm just saying that these Type 1 questions break my stride so to speak. I like to always have time at the end to check over everything, that's why I am so set on this. Then again, I only got a 163 on the October test and missed 14 on LR combined and only 5 on RC and LG combined. So there may be a problem with my approach to LR.

Do you really finish the LR section in 25-26 minutes? Why would you go so fast unless you were consistently getting them all right?

B/c I do worse on the section if I don't have time to check my answers back over.

Funny, I was just drilling this type today.

If the stimulus has a conclusion, look for a paraphrase.

Otherwise, you have to grasp the argument well and go POE.

What is a POE?