hi, i am a fairly avid reader, with a good pace of reading. however, i find myself struggling with reading comprehension passages in GRE, and i cannot figure out why. i sometimes tend to zone out while reading or the words just stop registering. i am not able to figure out what’s going wrong. i gave the GRE last month and it didn’t go very well because of the same reason. i have scheduled it again this month, and i am terrified of it happening again. is there anyone who has struggled with the same thing? what did you do to get out of this?
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Hi.
I’d say, even if you have a good pace of reading, getting the GRE RC questions correct requires a specific set of skills e.g., you need to focus on the most important words, you need to skip the sentences where the author just elaborates the previous information, you need to be very good at finding the main idea etc. I’d say, try to do untimed practice of these skills individually. Hopefully, you’ll see the improvement really quick.
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I had a similar problem; I used to lose my train of thoughts.
I countered it by making a habit of taking notes as I simplify the sentences, just like Greg does. It does take time, but you’ll get faster with practice.
Also, when you finish reading, take a look at your notes again and summarize the whole passage in your head.
Lastly, don’t forget to work on your skills related to answering the questions e.g., rephrasing the question, Elimination, justification.
Best of luck.
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I also kind of struggle with the same problem but I believe the most important thing you should do is to summarise (either para-wise or 2 to 3 sentences summary or an important sentence) what is happening in the passage like why is this given, what is the function of this sentence and why is the author writing it in your head or may be on paper whichever you are comfortable with. If you are abridged of the main idea then I think you will at least know what is happening in the paragraph. I strongly suggest you practice how to capture the main idea.
Undoubtedly, Practice does help you but If you are blindly solving some 20 questions without actually inferring what is wrong is futile. I suggest you practice and apply methods even if tire you or even they are new to you, and then see how Greg is approaching the same problem. You might infer some of your mistakes and might avoid them in the future.
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hey thanks! knowing someone struggles with the same problem validates my struggle haha! I’ll def try out summarizing and understanding the function of a sentence.
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hey, thank you so much! i will try out taking notes. i know it takes time which is why i was avoiding it, but i guess i gotta improve it with practice.
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exactly the same issue, some passages are soo intensely boring
and sometimes they are really interesting and my attention goes more towards the topic
man this is a struggle
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Have you found a specific way of doing this systematically? For example: I understand taht I can take any long passage from the big book and then find the function of all sentences. However, I’ll never know if I did it appropriately. So what I tend to do, is work on a passage and e.g. simplify or find the function, then watching videos on gregmat on how to solve the questions. But hten basically the main focus of the video is reading the text in order to answer the questions correctly, right? Or can we safely deduce that if we are not able to answer the questions to the long passages, we have not approached our strategy properly? Because on gregmat when handling the old Big book passages, multiple strategies are used simulteanously. It is not focusing on either just simplifying or just id’ing function. With only 2 days left, it would be nice to have a good method of practicing/drilling this that has proven for others to work 
Sorry for the late reply. My reply could be beneficial for other test-takers, however.
Yeah. That’s a good strategy. In fact, I too did the same, practicing individual skill and then watching old GRE walkthroughs to see if I did it correctly. But I skipped the answering-questions part; I felt that Greg’s explanation of the passage was enough for me. Also, I practiced skills on familiar passages first.
Things that I recently experimented with, which really helped me go through these passages quickly, were as follows.
- Focusing on the subject(s) and main verb. It lowers the cognitive load.
- Looking at different clauses (dependent and independent) separately. It too lowers cognitive load. However, focus more on the main clause because that’s the meat.
- Avoiding the tendency to translate in my own language while simplifying sentences.
- Making condensed notes.
A. I did this by inventing some symbols, such as an encircled ‘s’ when the author states someone else’s opinion, a negative sign when the author says something that contrasts with the previous point, a phi when the author concedes etc.
B. Writing the simplified sentences in my notes as short as possible. Sometimes writing just one important word for the entire sentence. - Looking at the notes again before moving to questions to summarize the main idea in my head.
- Predicting while reading but knowing that my predictions wouldn’t always work (‘flexibility’ as Greg puts it)
- Finally, I tried to become comfortable with not having to understand each and every thing in these passages.
The following is an example of Greg taking notes of the passage in real time. It took him 20 seconds or so. I used the above strategies and was able to crack an unfamiliar short passage (only the passage) in 2 mins.
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Hmmm these long passages can be a nightmare! Test day is next week and I am tensed already.
Have you watched all of Greg’s Prepswift videos? As someone who is good at “reading” but can’t manage to read quickly enough during the long passages as well, I found those videos very helpful. It actually helped me focus on key words, find the function of sentences (key is to simplify it in 5 words or less sometimes), and the relationships between each paragraph (e.g., main idea, support, support; introducing a paradox, solution, support; etc.)