Verbal Lecture-11

Reading Comprehension – (RC):

In most of the times you have read long Reading Comprehension (RC) passage, you find yourself totally lost when you reach at middle of the passage. You try to attempt the questions, but subsequently you realize that it take too long to attempt the question. Furthermore, during reading the passage, you see some unknown words that has noting to do with your mental dictionary. That is, these words are unknown to you, and you start panic. You say yourself, should I carry on reading or revise the whole passage where I lost understanding. You read through the passage and see lot of general knowledge as well as technical information in it. In most of the cases, you are unable to focus on it. Finally, after reading the whole passage completely, you start saying I have no idea what is the purpose of this passage and what is written in this passage. This is because your goals were more than one while you were reading the passage. You want to read for general information, and you also need to be cristal clear about meaning of words whose meaning you don’t know at all. Also you want to know the technical information as well that is noting to do with your interest or knowledge. That is the reason why you need to read the whole passage again and revise same mistake.

Ask yourself, does these general knowledge or technical information are the reason why you are reading this argument? You should change your thinking and revise the passage to read with purpose, rather than just for information. First of all, you focus must be on the purpose and scope of the passage while you read. Secondly you must not read the passage word by word, rather you need to develop a habit to skim the whole passage as soon as possible. For successful reading you must follow the following equation:

Successful reading = Speed + Accuracy

Speed reflects how quickly you read the whole argument. People who are very good in reading comprehension read the complete passage within 2 to 3 minutes. On other hand, accuracy reflects how much understanding about the passage has developed in your head. People who are excellent in RC develop 75% understanding about the passage. Remaining 20% contains some technical things that those people do not bother to think about. At this stage, you may ask me that whats the difference then? My response is “Strategy”. This means you do not need to enhance your reading speed too much, but only little bit. Only you need to apply reading strategy to perform well in RC section. Let’s discuss this by considering the below passage. Please do not read the passage at the moment. First read the strategies that is written after this passage and follow those strategies one by one and apply in the passage.

Passage:

Only few experiments directly testing the effects of cooking on net energy gained have been published. This small number is especially noteworthy given the abiding interest in calories and the impact of cooking on vitamin concentration and on the physical properties of food such as tenderness. However, thanks to the work of Rachel Carmody, we now have a series of experiments that provide a solid base of evidence proving contrary to popular belief that cooking has no net impact on calorie intake.

Rachel Carmody led a study in which mice were given regular mouse pellets for six days at a time, interrupted by four days of eating sweet potatoes or beef – half the time the sweet potato or meat was presented raw, and half the time cooked; half the time it was also pounded and half the time unpounded. For both meat and sweet potato, Rachel found that the mice gained more weight when the food was cooked than when it was raw. Pounding had very little effect.

Rachel hypothesized that in cooked beef, the muscle proteins, like the sugars in cooked starch, have opened up and allowed digestive enzymes to attack their amino acid chains. Cooking also does this for collagen, a protein that makes meat difficult to chew because it forms the connective tissue wrapped around muscle fibers. Another observation was that the mice had a spontaneous preference for eating cooked meat over raw meat, and their choice made sense, given that they fared better on it.

Further investigation along these lines revealed profound findings that the same food when cooked imparts 25% more calories than when eaten raw. Moreover, the calories obtained from raw foods are more likely to be converted to muscle mass versus fat. Therefore, those wanting to gain weight should eat highly processed and well-cooked meals. Conversely, those wanting to lose weight should do the opposite.

Strategy 1 – Involve yourself:

The first thing that you should know is get involved in the passage and flow your mind with the flow of the passage. In other words, you should think as if you are watching a story in your head, while reading the passage. But do not get emotional to it. Just involve for understanding. This will create your interest to the topic, object and goal of the passage. Even if the passage come from a background that is unknown or irrelevant to your field of background. If you start getting involved in the passage, you will start taking interest and will develop keen interest on the topic, objective and goal of the passage. Just as you watch movie, you slowly develop interest and when it get to the highest point, you become eager to know what would happen next after every event or interval. Similarly, after every paragraph, you will start getting interest that what would come in next paragraph? Perhaps you will start going on the right track thereafter. That is the point where your thought process works at the right time.

For instance, read the fist paragraph at somewhat slow speed. Remember that first paragraph is the most crucial step in gaining momentum of understanding your purpose, goal and objective in reading the passage and hence building interest and getting involved in the passage. So first paragraph is very crucial. After you read the first paragraph, come to the guidance here mentioned below:

Strategy 2 – Stop for 5 to 10 seconds and revise through your brain memory for purpose:

If you have read the first paragraph you must have develop a focus of your reading i.e what’s the purpose of this paragraph? Your response will be “to find out relationship between cooking types and weight gains through experiments.” And as soon as your head develop interest, like watching a movie starting scene, you will predict automatically that in next paragraph or paragraphs experiments and its results will be mentioned to find relationship. This strategy will help you revise each paragraph twice: 1 Through your eyes, and 2) through your memory power of brain. And this strategy will avoid the situation in which you think about revising the whole passage. In short passages, where the whole passage is given in only one lengthy paragraph, you can stop after few lines where you think appropriate and where you can maximum attain in your memory for few seconds. Through practice you will learn your stamina and power of your memory and hence make strategy accordingly. So where the information get overloaded, you should stop there and revise what have you read till that stage. do not revise by reading the passage again, rather revise without reading the passage. It means revise from the story or movie that you have made in your brain while reading the passage. Read lines quickly where you feel comfortable, but slowly where information is more technical and beyond your background field. At initial stage, I recommend to write the purpose of this paragraph in words. But later on when you get familiar with this thing, you will automatically no need to write down in points any further.

Strategy 3 – Read at that max speed where you can understand:

When it start some detail information like experiment, research finding, or any sort of details, read at max speed as you can. Just keep in mind don’t loose track while running with the speed. The detail information is mostly remained for long run in human mind. So don’t give much time to such things. Skim the details and more slow where you are unable to understand the line. For instance, in first paragraph, “impact of cooking on … and on …”. These are of trivial importance, thus you should not bother to read such information, just imagine like “impact of cooking on XYZ…” etc. If a specific question is asked from this detail portion, you may come back here easily in that case. But the chance is very rare. So be smart! 🙂

Now read the second paragraph. After you will become expert in RC, you can predict from this second paragraph that one specific question will be asked from this paragraph. Because it includes some experiments and clues about the study on which the whole passage depend. But as I said, the experiment or research kind of information is very easy to absorb so you must read these lines at full speed.

Strategy 4 – Understand the flow of the whole passage:

You must read the passage while building the organization of the passage in your mind. A typical RC passage contains long sentences with interlinked ideas. Few words like: However, Instead, Concludes that, Although, Yet Furthermore, and many other words will keep you inline with the flow of the passage. So you should focus on sentence structure that includes clauses and subject-verb pairs, modifiers. By doing this, you can easily reduce the long sentences into very short one. This will help you to understand the sentence easily and the intended meaning in the sentence that the author want to address.

Strategy 5 – Make a guess for finding meaning of difficult words:

You should try to understand the contextual meaning of words whose meaning you don’t know. For instance, in first paragraph, the contextual meaning of word “abiding” might be asked. If you ignore the trivial details of this sentence and read as “This small number is especially noteworthy given the abiding interest in calories and the impact of cooking on XYZ…” You will infer that although small in numbers, but very noteworthy. This suggests that it is only due to abiding interest (meaning too much or dedicated interest). Note that although its meaning is different from what is mentioned here. But the the contextual meaning is more important. Also note that the contextual meaning is always close to the actual meaning i.e everlasting.

Strategy 6 – analyze author’s tone in passage through keywords:

These are typically interlinked ideas. The author use transition words to introduce any new thought or idea and link with the previous flow of the passage. These words includes but are not limited to: Furthermore, additionally, moreover, also etc to present new information that adds to the thought that he had already presented before. Likewise, the author may includes other words such as: However, Yet, Despite, Instead, in contrast etc, to present new information that contradict prior information in previous line or previous paragraph of the passage. So paying attention to these keywords are quite handy in order to know what will happen next in this on going movie together with the organization and tone of the passage. For instance, in first paragraph of the passage above, you have started reading, but subsequently when you see word “However”, your thought changed and you think something contrast is now coming in the scene. So before moving to the next paragraph, it is highly recommended to predict what what will happen next. This, as I said, will make you get fully involved in the passage. As after reading first paragraph, and applying Strategy 2, your brain started thinking that in next scene of the movie, there could be some experiments or examples to show some required findings.

Strategy 7 – Convert technical names or terms into first initial capitals:

This strategy suggests that while reading some technical terms or names of persons or organizations etc, you should only say initial capitals or use initials with Mr/Ms in case of name of person. Usually these terms or names repeatedly come in the passage, so you can save couple of seconds every time and hence at least 1 minutes in the whole passage. Such technical terms and unknown names only add anxiety and complexity of the passage and work as roadblocks in reading passage. Thus, it’s better to smooth these roadblock first while reading the next line. Remember that your first target is to get crux of the paragraph graph and make a note. For instance, after reading the second paragraph, you may write down it as: “to explain a experiment and its result…”. Now before moving ahead, you must anticipate what the author will present in the next paragraph. In next paragraph, the author may present the reasons behind getting those results or the implication of these results etc.

Let’s read third paragraph. This starts with word ‘hypothesized’, so the author gives the assumption behind the taking experiments and result by Mr R. In other words, you may write down as “to present the theory (or assumption) behind the results as discussed in previous paragraph.”. This statement also will help if a question asked “What is the role of third paragraph in the whole passage?”. Any choice that gives similar information as you written note is correct answer with perfect precision. Notice that in third paragraph includes words “Cooking also…”, this means the author is going to add further information. Furthermore, the word “collagen” has nothing to do with our objective of reading the passage. It just a technical term, so you can just call it as “coll”, etc. Similarly, the word “Another observation…” enable you to ready for another result of the experiment. Finally you see words like “mice PREFER eating cooked food over raw food”. After completion of this paragraph, you may write down the note as described before as “to present the theory (or assumption) behind the results as discussed in previous paragraph.”. After that, think little more and predict what will the author present in the last paragraph after this. So far, we have seen two results and their explanation. Thus, the author may continue to present these results, or the implication of the result of the experiment, more like a takeaways from the experimental results or what to do next after getting these results.

Let’s read the final paragraph. The author has presented further results of the experiment and made extended investigation of the experiment to go in further depth. Next line starts with word “Moreover”, which gives further findings of the extended investigation. Finally, passage concludes its finding by starting the last sentence with “Therefore”. This shows how the author is now ready to derive a general rule from the experiment and its investigation.

Strategy 8 – Put all notes together:

This is the last strategy. After you complete the passage, put all the notes related to each paragraph together and know the organization, tone, primary purpose (i.e main idea) of the passage. In long passage, you will almost always asked any of such question related to tone of the author in describing the passage, or primary purpose of the passage etc. Your notes will help not only in answering such kind of general questions but also in answering specific question that you may go to that specific part easily. You will know from which paragraph the specific information is mentioned. And there you may go again and revise if you still need. So let’s make it for the passage above:

P1: Few studies on cooking impact but thanks to MR RC for giving lot of experimental results.
      → This study is contrast to popular belief.

P2: Explained an experiment and its result.
      → Mice gained more weight with cooked food.

P3: Explained the reason behind the result (Assumption).
      → Cooking changes structure of food.
      → Mice prefer cooked food.

P4: Further investigation.
      → Cooked food has 25% more calories.
      → Conclusion based on these findings.