Beginner's Guide to GMAT Reading Comprehension
UPDATED FOR THE NEW GMAT IN 2024
In our lives as GMAT Club’s resident verbal experts, we’ve literally been asked this question hundreds of times: “How can I improve on GMAT Reading Comprehension?” (Also common: “How can I improve on Critical Reasoning and/or Sentence Correction?”)
We wish that there was a quick, easy answer to that question, but as is often the case on the GMAT, there are no magic bullets. Instead, here’s an honest, long(!), BS-free guide to getting started with GMAT Reading Comprehension.
Read for structure and purpose on GMAT RC
Unless you’re totally new to the test, you’ve probably noticed that the GMAT always asks contextual questions about each RC passage. You’ll always see main idea or primary purpose questions on your GMAT exam, and if you’re scoring at a relatively high level, even the “detail questions” aren’t solely about details on the GMAT.
GMAT RC questions won’t, for example, ask you to repeat what line 27 says, but you might have to explain the role that line 27 plays in the author’s overall argument.
So what’s your first job when you see a GMAT Reading Comprehension passage? Understand the structure of the author’s overall argument, and WHY the author has written each part of the passage.
Here’s the basic structure that we recommend to our GMAT students: stop at the end of each paragraph, and ask yourself WHY the author has written the paragraph. Your focus should be on the big picture: each paragraph’s purpose and how each paragraph connects with that of the previous paragraph(s).
If you’re crystal-clear about WHY the author has written every paragraph – and how they fit together – you’ll be in great shape for the contextual RC questions that you’ll inevitably see next.
Don’t obsess over details on GMAT Reading comprehension
Here’s one of the worst tactical errors you can make on GMAT RC: if you’re trying to memorize all of the facts in a passage, you’re both wasting your time and missing the point of Reading Comprehension.
Again: GMAT RC questions will always ask you to synthesize the author’s overall argument. You’ll rarely be asked to just regurgitate facts.
Just as importantly, the facts will always be on the screen when you need them. There’s no reason to memorize all of them, or obsess over them, or write them all down. And it’s completely fine if you miss a few details, as long as you can still comprehend the overall purpose behind each paragraph.
If you struggle to understand a few sentences here or there on a GMAT RC passage, check to see if you still understand how the paragraph connects with the author’s overall argument. If you still understand WHY the author wrote that paragraph – and how it fits in with the rest of the passage – then there’s no reason to obsess over a few difficult phrases or sentences.
In other words: if you can understand the purpose of the paragraph without catching every single detail of the nastiest sentences, you win.
Get engaged on GMAT Reading passages
But here’s the thing with GMAT Reading Comprehension: no matter what, you have to be engaged and alert and attentive when you read. Many of you have solved thousands of algebra questions in your lives, and you might be able to solve a basic equation while literally half-asleep. That’s not how reading works: if you’re not awake, engaged, and conscious ALL of the time when you do RC, you’ll miss something important.
Many of you have heard this advice already: pretend that you’re interested whenever you read a GMAT RC passage. If that works for you, awesome.
Or maybe this one will work better: whenever you read a GMAT RC passage, pretend that a beautiful man or woman (whichever you prefer!) is reading the passage to you in a dimly lit bar. If that does the trick for you, great.
And if not? Well, maybe note-taking will help.
So what about note-taking on GMAT rc?
We wish that we could tell you that there’s ONE correct way to take notes on GMAT Reading Comprehension.
Unfortunately, that would be a lie. Everybody is different. Some people are much better at reading when they take tons of notes, because the physical act of writing something down helps them engage in the material (“kinesthetic learners”, if you like jargon). Other people disengage when they start taking notes, and they actually get worse at reading.
As GMAT tutors, we know that there’s no one-size-fits-all answer here. Different strokes for different folks.
The thing that matters: if you’re going to take notes, make sure that they’re rooted in the big picture of the RC passage. If you’re just writing "factfactfactfactfact" on your page, you’re probably missing the important things: WHY the author has written each paragraph, and how those paragraphs connect. Mindless, detail-oriented notes are probably not going to help you.
Most of our tutoring students end up taking minimal notes on GMAT Reading Comprehension passages – roughly 8-12 words per paragraph – just to remind them to engage in the purpose of each paragraph. If you do better on Reading Comprehension without taking notes, that’s great: just make sure that you’re focused on WHY the author has written each paragraph, and how the paragraphs connect.
And if you want to take more notes on GMAT RC, that’s OK, too. Just keep asking yourself: are these notes helping you comprehend the structure and purpose of the passage, or are you falling into the abyss of writing “factfactfactfactfactfactfact”?
No skimming, no gimmicks on GMAT Reading comprehension
There's some great test-taking advice out there for GMAT Reading Comprehension, but please beware of silly, oversimplified RC “tricks.” Some people will suggest that you should skim the passages, or at least some parts of them. Please don’t do this. It’s true that you don't need to understand every single detail in every GMAT passage, but you’ll get absolutely nowhere if you skip random pieces of the passage. You won’t know which sections are important until you actually try to read them.
So here’s the bad news: yes, you really do have to read the whole passage. You don't have to understand every single detail, but skipping random pieces of the passage definitely won’t help.
I’ve also heard people claim that it’s a good idea to read the first question before reading the passage, and I don’t think that’s going to help much, either: each GMAT Reading Comprehension passage has three or four questions, but you can only see the first one. I’ve never really understood how reading just ONE of the questions can possibly make you more accurate at comprehending the passage.
There’s a seemingly endless supply of these GMAT RC gimmicks. A large GMAT test-prep company once claimed that (D) is much more likely to be the answer than other answer choices. Sorry, that’s not true. I occasionally meet people who think that they can read just the first and last sentences of each paragraph, and one of our all-time favorite GMAT students thought that it would be wise to read RC passages backwards. Sorry, those things aren’t going to work, either.
The bottom line: if a GMAT Reading Comprehension “trick” sounds too good to be true, it definitely is.
Don’t fall in love on GMAT RC
Whenever you do anything on the GMAT verbal section, you should always look for four wrong answers – not one right answer. If you try to take shortcuts with this process, I can promise that you’ll make mistakes, especially on relatively difficult questions.
The easiest mistake to make on GMAT RC (or CR!) is this: you read the question, and an answer pops into your head. You immediately notice that, say, answer choice (B) sounds an awful lot like what you were thinking. So you choose (B), and you don’t really read (C), (D), or (E).
Meanwhile, there’s some little tiny modifier in (B) that makes it wrong. One word can completely change the meaning of an answer choice on the GMAT, right? But if you fall in love with (B) immediately – and fail to use the process of elimination – you can easily make a careless error. And careless errors on easy questions can quickly ruin your day on an adaptive test.
So don’t fall in love. Instead, always make sure that you’ve found four wrong answers, not one right answer. Unfortunately, this means that you’ll have to read every answer choice if you want to eliminate four of them. But on an adaptive test like the GMAT, that’s an investment that you absolutely need to make, on every single verbal question.
Stick with official GMAT RC passages
We have endless respect for our friends in the test-prep world who do their very best to write good, “non-official” questions, but we strongly recommend relying primarily on official questions for your GMAT Reading Comprehension practice. Many of you have heard this already, but the GMAT spends between $1500 and $3000 developing each official GMAT question, and even the very best test-prep companies can’t compete. (Including the tutors here at GMAT Ninja. We write our own questions, too. We think we’re good at it. You still shouldn't rely on them.)
On GMAT Reading Comprehension, official passages are loaded with subtle little twists of language, and your task is to get used to catching those subtleties. Non-official passages simply aren’t the same thing. So use the official GMAT materials wisely, and if you need extra GMAT RC practice, you might consider trying some LSAT questions.
Improving your fundamental GMAT reading skills
So you might be thinking: “Um, Ninja guy, I’m already doing basically everything you recommend. It’s not helping. I’m still unhappy with my GMAT verbal scores. What should I do?”
The bad news: the real reason you’re struggling MIGHT be that your reading skills simply aren’t as strong as you’d like them to be. You can follow every GMAT test-prep guru in the world and execute on every strategy that we have to offer. But if you’re struggling to understand the precise meaning of the passages and answer choices, all of the best GMAT strategy guides in the world might not help.
If this applies to you, that’s OK: turn your attention to improving your fundamental reading skills in English. The best way to do that is to read challenging stuff. Every day. Almost any high-quality reading material is fine, as long as the language is sophisticated enough to push your boundaries as a reader – so no comic books, I guess.
Want some recommendations? Check out our fiction and non-fiction reading lists to help you improve on GMAT Reading Comprehension.
The other piece of bad news is that doing a lot of reading is a long-run strategy: if you’re 10 days away from your GMAT exam, reading a few magazines at night isn’t going to immediately cure your weaknesses on GMAT Reading Comprehension. But over the long haul, the best way to get better at reading is to read more.
If it helps, think of it this way: college-educated native speakers have generally had at least 14 years of formal reading and literature instruction (in the U.S., English coursework is required from Kindergarten through 12th grade, and usually in the first year of university). So if you need six months or a year to improve your reading skills, that doesn’t sound so bad, does it?
Extra hope for non-native speakers on GMAT RC!
We know: spending months or years improving your reading skills isn’t easy. But for whatever it’s worth, if you haven’t been exposed to many GMAT-style texts in English, you probably have some room to improve relatively quickly.
We’re the first to admit that it can be really difficult to improve on the GMAT verbal section, but we’ve met countless test-takers over the years who have managed to gain 10+ points on the verbal section (two of our favorite examples can be found here and here). And a majority of them are non-native speakers. That’s the silver lining to taking this nasty exam in a foreign language: you might still have plenty of room to improve.
So keep at it!