Practice Test 45 Forum

[C_Koschier]

Question 16.

I got D. The correct answer is apparently C.

As I was registering this account, I was thinking, "Wow, I am going to make a thread and ask someone to explain this to me, because I seem completely lost as to this."
Well, as I was writing said thread, I realized that C does indeed fulfill the conditional logic gate to weaken the stimulus the most... but common sense strongly dictates to me that the answer should be D.

This raises a probably more important question, then. You extremely high scoring test takers out there, how did you analyze the LR questions when you answered them? Did you simply read the stimulus, and answer the question based on what seemed to most fulfill the question to you? Or did you have a more methodological approach to breaking down the questions and answer choices, then selecting what you felt was most appropriate. Or anything else, really.

Thank you very much.

[Triveal]

When you sense it's an "easy" question, you can probably keep everything in your head, go with your gut, guess the answer choice, not read D and E if you read C and are absolutely sure - that kind of thing. This can take some practice, but if you can do it accurately it's one of the best ways to speed up your LR sections.

On the other hand, when I come across a "hard" question (it's pretty obvious, most of the time, which questions these are), I double check everything. Even if I read C and am thinking "yep, that's exactly what I was expecting the answer to be", I will go through D and C. If there is more than one conditional statement, I will diagram all of them. You learn after lots of questions where your time and brain power needs to be spent.

[bp shinners]

People who go with their gut can score well, but their scores tend to be more swingy.

If you want to consistently score well, you have to have a methodological approach that you apply every time.

[C_Koschier]

In order to approach it that way, will I be breaking down every single question into its sum components, and answering accordingly?

[bp shinners]

In order to approach it that way, will I be breaking down every single question into its sum components, and answering accordingly?

More or less. Though with enough practice, breaking a simple question into its sum components probably takes less time than just thinking it through (because you are, in essence, just thinking it through, only with a set approach so you're not repeating any steps in your head to make sure they stick).

[TopHatToad]

A strictly formal, bit-by-bit approach will (or should) give you the right answer every time. However, it's not reasonable to expect people to actually accomplish this on test day; the time requirements are high. The nearer to the beginning of LR you are, the easier the question will usually be. Therefore, you shouldn't second-guess your gut on question #2, for example, but definitely should on question #16, near the peak of the section's difficulty.

Obviously the goal is to approach every single question methodically, but unless that's realistic for you, save it for the harder problems. As a rule of thumb, if you can predict the correct answer before seeing it, and you're in the first... let's say 12 questions, bubble and move on.

Btw, for #16, notice the "many" in D versus the "most" in C. Many is equivalent to "some" and so the statement is significantly weaker than its correct counterpart.