How to develop your comprehension skills

Hello there,

One of the difficulties of the GMAT (as of other language tests) is vocabulary in the comprehension.

For the reading comprehension, you can use deductions in order to guess the meaning of the difficult words.

Firstly, you should Bear in mind that with up to 40% of words you don’t seem to understand, your brain is able to build the missing information in order to understand.
Indeed you ONLY need to understand 60% of a text in order to be able to answer the GMAT questions if you manage to trust the hypothesis that you are able to make.

What’s more, the general context can help you to make assumptions about the meaning of the text.
The immediate context should also be helpful.

To continue the nature of the word should be useful.
Is it a noun? If so it is either a concept or an object.
Is it a verb? Then is could either be an action or a state.
Is it an adjective? It should then qualify a noun.
Is it an adverb? In this case it describes how an action is done or gives precisions about the verb.

Then, you could also use the way the word is formed.
Indeed it has a root or stem (the basis of the word or radical in French). You may know its meaning which could definitely enable you to confirm or infirm your hyptohesis.

The stem is often surrounded by a prefixe (before the stem) and by a suffixe.
You may remember or learn that these suffixes and prefixes have a meaning which influences the one of the stem.
In unfortunately, the stem is fortunte which means lucky. The prefixe « un » specifies it is a contrary and the suffixe « ly » precises it is an adverb (in French souvent un adverbe en -ment).

Another well-known technique is to pretend these words are not in the text and to do with all the numerous words and sentences you understand.
I often say to my students to underline what they understand (and not what they don’t understand) and to decipher (decode) the text using the underlined words.

I hope this tip is going to help you and that you’ll now practise comprehension with more pleasure.