GMAT OG 12 RC Review

The changeover to the 12th edition, 45 problems and 7 passages were removed, leaving 113 repeated problems and 20 passages (including all Diagnostic problems and passages). 43 problems and 7 passages were then added, bringing the total to 156 questions and 27 passages—almost exactly the same as in the 11th edition

As in the 11th edition, GMAC clearly caps its word limit for Reading Comprehension passages at 350 words, whereas in the past, passages could extend as long as 460 words. The takeaway? Look for shorter, denser passages and an increasing emphasis on unique question types that require less of a "word search" technique, and more of a nuanced understanding of what is being asked. Slightly more than 10% of the 12th edition's Reading Comprehension questions fit the "Function" variety taught in Veritas Prep classes, in which the reason why the author cites a specific detail is of prime importance, not just the detail itself. Our analysis confirms that the proprietary Veritas Prep STOP strategy is the perfect strategic approach to attaining Reading comprehension mastery. STOP emphasizes a structural understanding of each passage, helping the test-taker deduce the author's intent and more quickly identify where pertinent details will appear. Furthermore, nearly half of the Reading Comprehension questions in the 12th edition fit into Critical Reasoning-style categories, reaffirming the value of the logical approach introduced in "Arguments", the opening lesson of the Veritas Prep program.
Reference : Veritas Prep

Read more...

RC

Do comprehend this tough passage.

Not long ago cancer medicine in the U.S. passed a hopeful milestone: for the first time, the incidence rates for both new cases and deaths in men and women declined, according to an annual report issued in late November from the National Cancer Institute, the American Cancer Society and other leading organizations. Between 1999 and 2005 diagnosis rates dropped annually by about 0.8 percent. Although deaths from some specific conditions have gone up, overall mortality from cancer is on the decline for both men and women of almost all ethnic groups, as it has been since the early 1990s, in large part because of a shrinking toll from malignancies of the lung, prostate, breast and colon.
That good news invites some cautious interpretation. Incidence rates might have fallen because fewer patients are going for mammograms, prostate screening tests and other diagnostic procedures; if so, physicians may not yet be aware of cases that will eventually surface. The drop in the mortality statistics may largely reflect the population’s healthier way of life—most significantly, its decision to kick the tobacco habit. That development is highly welcome, but it may be hard to maintain as a trend: How many other changes can people make that will be so beneficial?
To keep this anticancer momentum, therefore, health care will surely need to step up prevention and treatment in ways that are more tolerable (and affordable) for the general public. The evolving clinical field of nanomedicine may hold many of the answers, as biomedical researchers James R. Heath, Mark E. Davis and Leroy Hood describe in their article (link).
The term “nanomedicine” still conjures up images of teams of microscopic robots performing lifesaving surgery inside our tissues, like the miniaturized submarine crew in the 1966 movie Fantastic Voyage. Given the state of the relevant technologies, any such possibility seems at least decades away. (Personally, I will have more confidence in nanobot surgical teams sometime well after engineers can build, say, crews of autonomous dog-size robots that can keep bridges and tunnels in good repair.) But this does not mean nanomedicine is as vaporous.
Rather, in the same way that nanotechnology is better understood as the application of quantum mechanics to engineering, not the use of atoms as building blocks, nanomedicine might best be viewed as a systemic approach to understanding and maintaining health at the molecular level. As Heath, Davis and Hood explain, the accelerating advance of genomic science makes it easier to identify the hallmarks of illnesses even when no symptoms may be apparent to the patient or clinician. Not only could new blood tests diagnose a nascent liver tumor, for example, but they could also determine to which subcategory of brain tumor it belonged and suggest which gene-focused treatments might be most effective.
Such measures could not always guarantee a cure, but they might someday be able to make often fatal diseases such as cancer and AIDS manageable, much as diabetes is now. The brilliant paradox of nanomedicine is that by focusing on what is extremely small, it can provide a better way to treat a whole person.

Read more...

Notes of RCS

Think of your notes this way: you're just trying to make a short table of contents so that you know the main ideas and so that you know where (in which paragraph) specific types of information can be found. You should be able to answer any "big idea" questions without going back to the passage but you should NOT be able to answer any "specific detail" questions without going back to the passage. Instead, you should be able to decide quickly from your table of contents which paragraph you need to go to in order to answer the specific detail question - and then you go to that paragraph and learn what you need to learn.
This allows you to take notes much more quickly on the first read-through and also allows you to use the information efficiently. We don't want to get too into all of that detail on the first read-through because they're going to write about twice as many questions as they're going to give any one person. In other words, I know I'm not going to get questions about all of the detail, because I'm not going to see all of the questions that were written for this passage!

Use serious abbreviations, label your info by paragraph (P1, P2, etc), and know that it's rare to have more than one line of notes per paragraph - maybe a mix of 5-10 words / symbols / abbreviations per paragraph. (That can obviously vary depending upon your short-term memory.)

Read more...

Forms of GMAT RC

There are two forms of RC
1. long passage - It has more than 50 lines(usually 70 lines)
2. short passage - It has less than 50 lines (usually 35 lines)

Overview of long passage
It has more than 50 lines(usually 70 lines) and contains 4-5 questions .It will be made boring and tedious as possible by using dry,clinical language, replete with long, detail laden sentences. The issue is there is too much information to absorb in one reading and in less time. The solution to this is to create a SKELETAL SKETCH of the passage during your first reading which serves the purpose of retention and getting a general idea. The SKELETAL SKETCH provides a search tool for answering SPECIFIC questions. Also SKELETAL SKETCH provides readymade answers for GENERAL questions.These types of question will be discussed in other post.

Overview Short passage

It has less than 50 lines (usually 35 lines) and contains 3-4 questions.There is sufficint time to outline short passages in thier entirety. We have to make a detailed map which serves purpose of retention of text, general structure and gives key details of the text . DETAIL map will help answering both SPECIFIC questions and GENERAL questions.

Read more...

GMAT RCs

GMAT passages cover variety of topics, but thet come from primarily three areas, So we can divide these into three categories.
1. Social Science :
Social or historic issues, such as civil rights movement, labor rights or World Wars
2. Science:
science(biology,geology,physics etc) topics like worms, lizards, genes , chromosomes, black , genetic mapping (things u can't even imagine)holes ,etc
3. Bussiness:
The topic we all are familiar with, but don't let your knowledge make you answer the question. bussiness related topics, such as management stratergies or the trade laws.

RC is one of the toughest section of GMAT , You should b able to comprehend the passage in 4 mins and answer all the questions in less than 5 mins. In my next post will give the source and practice materials for RCs.

Read more...

RC - Biology .Do you get it in 3 mins?

In the first human trial of its kind, a vaccine grown in genetically engineered tobacco plants has proved to be safe, paving the way to one day use it to help combat a potentially fatal form of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.Researchers report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA that the experimental vaccine triggered the immune systems of 11 of 16 volunteers (with so-called follicular B-cell lymphoma) to attack their tumors without any apparent dangerous side effects.Some 18,000 Americans, typically between the ages of 60 and 65, are diagnosed annually with this incurable, slow-growing type of cancer. Study coauthor Ronald Levy, an oncologist at the Stanford University School of Medicine, says that physicians generally take their cues from the disease, waiting to see how fast it is moving—and treating it with toxic chemotherapy (sometimes with radiation) only if it becomes aggressive.
He says that if future trials are successful, the experimental vaccine, which can be made relatively quickly and cheaply, could become a short-term therapy administered immediately after diagnosis to try to keep tumors in check."This may not be a replacement for chemotherapies, but a supplement for them," Levy says. "A technology that is fast, like this one, is more amenable to a watchful waiting approach than a technology that is slow to produce."This and other anti-cancer vaccines work by pumping a patient full of the same protein or antigen that is on the surface of tumor cells. Researchers believe that if the body contains enough of the protein, the immune system will recognize it as a potential danger and send out armies of disease-killing cells to seek and destroy tumors harboring it.To make the vaccine, researchers took a sample of a patient's tumors, which in this trial were made up of B cells (white blood cells that help the body battle disease and infection). They then extracted the gene from the cells that coded for the antigen they needed (to help the immune system recognize the tumors as threats). The key, researchers say, was to make enough of the protein quickly to prompt an immune response.In this case, the scientists achieved this by inserting the gene into a plant microbe known a tobacco mosaic virus (TMV). Plants are infected with TMV simply by scratching their leaves and depositing the virus into the tears. Researchers discovered that the virus spreads throughout tobacco plants within a week, in the process cranking out a surfeit of the coveted proteins. The scientists ground the leaves and separated out the antigen, which they then injected into volunteers.They found that the immune systems of 70 percent of participants perked up when blasted with antigens specific to their cancers. The researchers report mild side effects, such as swelling around the injection site and mild to moderate flu symptoms in some participants within a week of getting the vaccine. Of the original group of 16—who ranged in age from 30 to 64—three died (from the disease, not the vaccine), but 13 are still alive and their diseases are in remission up to eight years since being given the vaccine.All of the patients also received chemotherapy, so researchers cannot be certain what role, if any, the vaccines played. Levy says more work is being done to assess the vaccine's effectiveness.Charles Arntzen, a plant biologist at the Arizona State University Biodesign Institute, says a major plus is how fast the vaccine can be whipped up. "I think without the speed," he says, "it would be hard to convince a cancer patient to wait for a vaccine to be developed, rather than going on some other therapy."Levy is trying to find a new biotech company to begin efficacy trials on humans as soon as possible. He says that a vaccine like this one could be on the market as soon as it proved effective and safe.

Read more...