erricka here with props ecology met back
today with my number one GMAT reading
comprehension trick for avoiding wrong
answer traps as always if you like this
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are in the description
wrong answer choices on reading
comprehension questions often use
language either directly from the
passage or closely related to the
passage to trick you into picking them
they're meant to look right to someone
who is trying to match an answer choice
to the text however these trap answer
choices are often totally unrelated to
the question assumptions that don't have
adequate support or even the opposite of
the correct answer so how can we avoid
these trap answers the secret to
avoiding wrong answer traps on GMAT
reading comprehension is to make a
prediction before we look at the answer
choices this means that when we get to a
question we read the question stem and
then completely ignore the answer
choices when we make a guess in our own
words for what the correct answer choice
will be if it's a general question we
should be able to make our prediction
without hunting back through the passage
if it's a detail or extrapolation
question we should look for an answer in
the passage and then make a prediction
only when we finished making our
prediction should we look at the answer
choices let's try this process with a
real GMAT example problem reading over
the question we see that it asks which
of the following answer choices did
Russian socialists within the women's
movement and most booj Hwa feminists
disagree about now hopefully before
we've even looked at this question we've
done a thorough scheme of the passage
but if for some reason we haven't we'll
go ahead and do that now the first
paragraph tells us that there are two
currents in the Russian women's movement
one is Buju Hwa feminists and the second
is socialist feminist so the first
paragraph is about the two groups in our
question seems like a really good place
to look for a difference between them we
should also notice that this paragraph
contains the transition keywords by
contrast this indicates that this
sentence is talking about differences
differences between the socialist
feminists in this sentence and the
boudoir feminists in the
sentence before so the by contrast
sentence seems like where we want to
look for our answer if we quickly look
at the second paragraph to confirm we
should notice that the topic sentence
starts with however which tells us that
this paragraph is switching ideas away
from the differences in the paragraph
before it then goes on to say that
booyah and socialist feminist shared
certain underlying beliefs so this
paragraph is probably focused on the
similarities between the groups not the
differences scanning the rest of the
second paragraph we should see even more
similar language both areas of agreement
concurred etc so this paragraph isn't
going to talk about differences and we
can safely ignore it focusing in on our
by contrast sentence we start to see our
key differences the socialist feminists
in this sentence as compared to the
boudoir feminists from the sentence
before emphasize different things
socialist feminist focus on class while
boudoir feminist focus on gender
similarly socialist feminist focus on
socialist revolution while boudoir
feminists focus on legal reform so we
have two big differences class versus
gender and socialist revolution versus
legal reform so we should predict that
the correct answer choice will include
one of these differences okay now that
we finally have a prediction we can look
at our answer choices right away we
should notice that a says the group's
disagreed about how central or how
important legal reform is the importance
of legal reform was in our prediction so
this must be the correct answer we spent
about three seconds on these answer
choices so far and we can already pick a
as our correct answer because we made a
good prediction but even more
importantly than saving us time making a
prediction helped us avoid getting
caught in any of the trap answers on
this question if we look at them now
which is often a good way to confirm our
answer will notice that each of the
wrong answer choices has related
language in the passage if we didn't
have a good prediction we could have
easily looked at a wrong answer choice
checked it against the text gone hey I
see this in the passage looks good and
picked it because it seemed to fit
however because we do have a prediction
we can easily eliminate all of the wrong
answer choices because they don't match
our prediction if you have any questions
what we talked about today or suggestion
for future video
please leave us a comment below thanks
for watching and happy reading
comprehension studies