GMAT Verbal Section Skills - Reading Comprehension
The verbal section of the GMAT consists of three primary types of questions, which includes critical reasoning questions, reading comprehension questions, and grammar and sentence structure questions. The reading comprehension questions included on the exam are designed to evaluate an individual's ability to understand the relationship between key concepts in a passage, the individual's ability to understand the passage itself, or apply information that the individual acquired from reading the passage. Each of these questions will present the individual with a passage ranging from approximately 150 - 350 words that will describe information related to topics such as biology, chemistry, earth science, economics, history, marketing, physics, politics, and a variety of other topics. The exam-taker will have to read this passage and use the information from the passage to answer the corresponding questions associated with the passage.
For example, if the individual was required to read the above paragraph, he or she might be asked to identify the main topic of the passage. The choices provided might be:
- ( A ) General Academic Topics
- ( B ) Quantitative Section of the GMAT
- ( C ) Reading Comprehension Questions on the GMAT
- ( D ) Critical Reasoning Questions on the GMAT
- ( E ) General Science
The answer for this particular example would be choice "C" as the passage is describing the Reading Comprehension Questions on the GMAT. The passages on the actual exam will usually be longer and may be somewhat more complicated than this example, but the reading comprehension questions on the exam will be setup in a similar format. The verbal section of the GMAT usually includes approximately 11 to 14 questions related to reading comprehension.