hi i'm erika one of the senior curriculum managers here at magoosh and a gmat expert
and in today's video i'm going to talk about the gmat sample questions you need to crush the gmat
off with reading comprehension so in reading comprehension there are going to be several
question types that you want to be prepared for because you're extremely likely to see them on
test day so the first one is going to be primary purpose or main idea so those are going to be the
sorts of questions that are focused on bigger ideas that are explicitly stated in the passage
you're also going to want to look at detail and supporting ideas so those are going to be those
smaller ideas maybe that show up in a paragraph or a sentence that are again explicitly stated
within the passage you're also going to want to be prepared for inference questions and these are a
little trickier because they can be big ideas and small ideas like the previous two question types
but they're going to deal with things that are implicitly stated in the passage so things that
are a hundred percent true but that the passage doesn't come right out and say the next question
type is gonna be logical structure which is gonna have to do with what a paragraph or a sentence or
a word is doing within the context of the passage so how does it serve the passage as a whole then
we're going to look at application questions which are kind of like inference questions but going a
step further so applying what we know from the passage to something that is beyond the passage
potentially a new situation and then finally we have style and tone which is going to have to do
with where on the spectrum of feeling or emotion is the author or someone in the passage about
something specific moving into critical reasoning first we're gonna have weaken or find the flaw
so this question type is going to feature answer choices that make the argument
worse or make the conclusion less likely to be true on the flip side we've got strength
in questions which is going to feature answer choices that make the argument stronger and make
that conclusion more likely to be true then we have assumption which is kind of like a strengthen
um but it basically features answer choices that are essential to the argument that are necessary
to make that argument true or that conclusion valid this is kind of a tricky question type for
a lot of students so i really recommend checking out mason's video on assumption questions and then
we have inference and conclusion questions which rather than featuring something that's going to
strengthen or weaken or underlie that argument do something to the conclusion these are questions
that are going to feature conclusions as the answer choice so what can we logically infer
from the argument now these four question types are going to make up 75 of critical reasoning
questions on your test day but there are some other question types that you want to be prepared
for so one of those is argument structure which is kind of like logical structure from reading
comprehension um but the particular flavors of those that you want to be prepared for are
boldface which is where they're going to be sentences that are in bold and we have to describe
how they relate to the argument as a whole and potentially how they relate to each other
there's also going to be dialogue questions which is where the argument is composed of a
couple of different perspectives and then we have to describe how those perspectives relate to each
other next we've got paradox questions which are kind of like strengthen or assumption questions
but they're in an argument that at the surface seems not to make logical sense or a paradox
then we have evaluate questions which are a lot like a weekend so that's going to be evaluating
an argument and figuring out where that argument breaks down and then finally complete the argument
questions which are kind of tricky because we're going to need to fill in an unspecified portion
of that argument so it could be something like an assumption or a premise that's necessary for that
conclusion to make sense or it could be something like a conclusion the culmination of that argument
and moving on to sentence correction so sentence correction is going to have less obvious question
types but there are things that we should be prepared for to be tested in these questions so
the first one is going to be agreement so that's going to be whether or not the number between
nouns and pronouns or nouns and verbs agrees so is everything singular is everything plural we're
also going to want to be prepared for verb tense so does the time of the verb make sense and does
it align with other verbs in the sentence or does it fit the timeline established by the sentence
next is going to be grammatical construction which is really broad but it's going to basically cover
whether or not something is a sentence so is it a complete independent clause or is it a fragment
or is it a run-on so if we take out all the crap in the sentence is it still a sentence next is
parallelism which is going to deal with whether lists or comparisons have parallel pieces so are
all the things in the list or the comparison the same part of speech next we have logical
predication which is kind of a tricky one it's kind of a fancy way of saying a modifier question
so this is going to have to do with whether or not our modifiers are constructed grammatically
so are we using the different types of modifiers correctly but also whether our modifiers make
sense so are our modifiers describing what we'd like them to describe to make a sentence that
is logical next we have rhetorical construction which is going to be kind of all the stuff that
doesn't really fit under grammar but that's important to the effectiveness of the sentence
so some important ones here redundancy which is making sure that we're not ever saying the same
thing twice concision which is making sure that we're getting the correct meaning of the sentence
about as efficiently as possible and then related clarity so making sure that we don't have any
ambiguity in the sentence especially when it comes to things like pronouns and last we have
diction and idiom which are basically questions on whether or not we're saying something in
proper english big air quotes on that um i have a video on this that recently came out about 10
of the most common idioms that you'll see on test day but as i say in this video this is a
hard topic to study for and it's something that's rarely tested in a vacuum so i highly recommend
prioritizing the other things on this list before studying this all right moving on to gmat quant
so gmat quant has two question types problem solving and data sufficiency so problem solving
is often more straightforward for most test takers because it's a lot like the questions that
you've been seeing throughout your educational experiences five answer choices one explicitly
right data sufficiency however is going to be less familiar and a lot of students miss questions here
just because the question type is unfamiliar so when you're going through your sample questions
really prioritize data sufficiency and make sure that you thoroughly understand each answer choice
and what these questions are really asking now similar to in sentence correction within data
sufficiency and problem solving there are going to be several topics that are tested that we
want to be prepared for so kind of the three big umbrellas on gmat math are going to be arithmetic
elementary algebra and geometry so starting with arithmetic there are going to be things that we
expect here like fractions percents and ratios integer properties but arithmetic also encompasses
things like statistics as well as counting sometimes known as permutations and combinations
and probability so these are going to show up on your test day guaranteed not in huge numbers
but they will be there so they're things that you want to be prepared for under elementary algebra
we're looking at things like expressions and equations so simplifying rearranging and solving
now for equations we want to be prepared for linear quadratics systems of equations
all of the stuff that you probably remember from high school but might need a refresher on
we also want to be prepared for kind of the weirder algebraic things like inequalities and
absolute value now for all of those scenarios we want to be prepared that they'll be presented as
a word problem so in a scenario where they're presented as english rather than math um there
are a bunch of different word problem types that are likely to show up on test day that are kind of
fan favorites of the gmat writers so let me know if you'd like a video on the most
common types of word problems on the gmat and then finally we have powers and roots
so things related to exponents and there are many rules then finally we have our geometry umbrella
so within geometry we've got our 2d geometry which is going to be mostly kind of what we expect from
this so a lot of triangles quadrilaterals circles other polygons and lines and angles we also have
a little bit of 3d geometry which is when we're going to add another dimension get into things
like volume and surface area and then finally we have coordinate geometry which has to do with
graphing on the coordinate plane so this could be graphing shapes but it could also be graphing
our linear equations our quadratic equations our systems of equations our inequalities are absolute
values so kind of a broad umbrella here and those are the gmat sample questions that you
need to practice before your test day because they're extremely likely to show up now if
you'd like more information on any of the question types or concepts that i mentioned in this video
we've got a ton of videos on our channel some by me some by our other experts that are gonna dig
deeper into each of these so i highly recommend just giving it a search on our channel
and seeing what comes up let us know if this video helped you by liking and subscribe for more videos
from me and the other experts at magoosh and if you have comments or suggestions or questions
leave those in the comments below thanks for watching and i'll talk to you soon