"Can you hear the music, Robert?" - Niels Bohr

Struggling with Verbal? This post might help you identify what’s actually going wrong.

Let's talk about music. Sometimes, music just plays in the background. You hear the sounds, but nothing really stays with you.

Then there are moments when you’re completely immersed in a song. You understand the lyrics, anticipate the beats, and feel connected to the rhythm without consciously trying. Everything feels cohesive.

That difference is very similar to the difference between reading and comprehending on the GMAT.

Comprehension vs Reading

All of us read. Not all of us comprehend.

Reading is passive. Your eyes move across the words, but your brain never fully engages with the ideas. You finish the passage, but nothing really sticks.

Comprehension is active. You understand the exact meaning of each sentence and mentally connect the ideas into a clear story. You can visualise the argument, predict where the author is going, and remember the structure naturally.

When that happens, Verbal starts feeling far less complicated.

You can actually observe this same effect in music. When you’re immersed in a song, the beats stop feeling random because your brain understands the underlying pattern. The experience feels smooth and connected.

RC and CR work the same way. Most students struggle not because the questions are impossibly difficult, but because they never fully connect with the passage or argument in the first place.

As a result:

• We forget details quickly
• We reread excessively
• We lose track of the author’s logic
• Every answer choice starts sounding equally reasonable

Why is this Crucial?

Once comprehension improves, your relationship with Verbal changes completely.

You stop relying on vague instincts and start understanding the logic behind the passage. RC passages feel more organised, CR arguments become easier to manipulate, and difficult questions stop feeling chaotic.

One of the biggest reasons students fail to improve is that the brain constantly tries to conserve energy. Real comprehension is mentally demanding, so the mind defaults to superficial reading unless you actively force deeper engagement.

That’s why simply “doing more questions” often doesn’t solve the problem.

How to Fix It

Practice active comprehension daily for 30–40 minutes.

While reading:

• Connect ideas actively
• Ask yourself why each sentence exists
• Predict where the author is going next
• Visualise whatever you read
• Notice when your mind drifts into passive reading - pull it back

This process feels slower initially, but over time, it dramatically improves retention, clarity, and accuracy.

Developing deep comprehension was the single biggest reason my Verbal performance improved rapidly.

Aakkash Singh
V90 Tutor | Building CentPrep.com | Affordable & High Quality GMAT Verbal Learning

I have not been diagnosed with any disorders, but I have always struggled with holding my attention on one task. As I write this post, I JUST switched away from making updates to my website.

The problem with most test-takers like us is that we cannot shut our minds up for two consecutive minutes at a time. That is what I struggled with for the longest time when I was preparing for the GMAT and earlier for the CAT.

I would be reading an RC about romanticism in 17th-century Europe - and suddenly, roses pop up in my mind, then come the thorns, then I start thinking about band-aids. The spiral is infinite.

If this sounds like something you struggle with, keep reading. I know you want to switch tabs (me too).

The solution to this problem was obviously multi-layered, but two very important aspects that helped me deal with it were:

1. Switching from EYE reading to MIND comprehension.

The idea is simple: reading with our eyes is a dangerous habit that that appears benevolent. You can save time with it, but did you notice the the double use of 'that' in the last sentence?

Or the double 'the's used in the last sentence? Last time, I swear.

The problem with EYE comprehension is - your eyes are input devices. Your mind is the real tool that does the comprehension. If you don't slow down, you'll end up in a 'what did I just read, I don't remember any of it' ditch.

2. Curiosity

One thing about many of us with attention disorders is that while it's hard for us to focus - once we are locked into a task, nothing can pull us out.

Comprehension and your approach to solving Verbal questions should be less robotic and more human; try to be curious about what the author says.

Curiosity leads to engagement. Engagement leads to retention. Retention leads to V90s.

Every RC passage is trying to tell you something new. Engage with it curiously, and you will find that you were not missing any skills; you were missing a human factor in comprehension. Good comprehension is the only constant to Verbal Success.

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That being said, I believe that this post should've been smaller for the intended audience. Alas, I don't use LLMs.

I am no expert on medical conditions; I just shared my experience and two cents. Hope it was helpful!

Caffeinatedly,

Aakkash Singh
V90 | Affordable Tutor | Building www.centprep.com

Michael Jordan famously studied game tape obsessively, not just to watch highlights, but to understand mistakes, tendencies, and decision-making.

One mistake I see GMAT students make constantly is overcomplicating mock analysis.

People turn reviews into:

• Giant Excel sheets
• 40-column error logs
• AI-generated score breakdowns
• A task for later

But the most valuable parts of mock analysis are not the statistics that you can pull out of it. The journey to get to this data, when outsourced, will kill improvement chances.

The GMAT is fundamentally a very repetitive test. Most students are making the same handful of mistakes over and over:

• rushing
• misreading
• weak setup
• abandoning structure
• solving instead of reasoning, etc.

No AI analysis or fancy dashboard can replace the learning that happens when you force yourself to revisit the actual thinking process behind a mistake.

That would be like Michael Jordan asking someone else to study game tape for him.

Want to learn how to analyse mocks properly? DM me.

I’m kidding.

Here’s the process:

1. Start with the first missed question
2. Re-solve it without looking at the solution
3. Could you solve it this time?
4. If yes, what went wrong during the test?
5. If no, identify the exact gap in reasoning
6. At the end, write down 3 mistakes you refuse to repeat in the next mock

That’s basically it.

Most people want to perform like Jordan.

Very few want to review like him.

The GMAT and GRE's Reading Comprehensions are challenging undertakings which can really be hard to deal with for most people, but why? That was the question I asked myself after analysing one of my mocks.

With the benefit of hindsight, just like everyone else, I found the RC questions I got wrong to be super easy. This got me thinking, why did I mess them up the first time around?

Now, with years of experience as a tutor and having helped dozens of students move past their verbal section fears, I see things more clearly than ever before, and the reason why we suck at solving RCs is that we often approach them with the wrong mindset.

A lot of GMAT Prep companies and tutors will teach you to scan for answers in RCs when, instead, you spend 50% of your time studying verbal learning CR logical skills - all that developed CR logic isn't being used in RCs at all! We need to change this.

Scanning for answers is word matching, which is, in essence, shape-matching. A 2-year-old could match shapes easily. Where is the logic in that? These are tests of logic.

A logical approach to RCs (just like with CR) is the most overlooked aspect among RC skills, but its importance cannot be overstated.

So the next time you see an RC, don't just try to memorise the passage - understand what the author wants to say and form a logical decision about answer choices on that basis.

TL;DR - Shift from scanning answers to using logic to find answers in RCs.

Best wishes,

Aakkash Singh
V90 Verbal Expert

"I always get stuck between two answer choices, and end up picking the wrong one"
"The right answer choice does not talk about XYZ... How can it be the primary purpose?"

A lot of my students have had these doubts with primary purpose questions, and it usually stems from some lacking fundamentals, BUT it also arises from the dissonance between how most of us understand the questions and how the question is really structured.

Generally speaking, primary purpose questions are misunderstood as summary questions that contain the essence of the passage, meaning that the answer choice with the most essence of the passage in question will be deemed the correct answer.

That understanding is where the trouble comes in. Let's understand primary purpose questions from a different lens now.

What is the primary purpose of skateboarding? JOY! The term "Primary Purpose" itself means to ask us about the reason why a passage was written. What did the author want to do with the text? NOT what all topics does the passage talk about...

SO, instead of trying to find the passage in the answer choices, try to find the answer choices (or what they speak of) in the passage; you will find that these questions are made much simpler by this means of thinking about them.

EXAMPLE

Some common answer choices under primary purpose questions are

1. note a flaw in a scientific finding
2. note a difference between two sides of a debate

In both these cases, your job as a test taker trying to eliminate the answer choices is to find what these answer choices talk about in the given passage, is there any flaw in the scientific finding? Is there a scientific finding in the passage in the first place?

Is there a debate described in the passage?

If you cannot find the mentioned element in the passage - eliminate the answer choice.

Don't overcomplicate primary purpose questions.

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Aakkash Singh
V90 Verbal Expert

When my students solve CR questions with me, I notice a common pattern - we don't think about what we read, we often take the information the author gives us at face value.

Therein lies the problem most of us suffer from when it comes to solving CR questions effectively - the lack of cohesion around the introduced ideas.

CR and RC passages are just like machines; they have individual parts that connect to make the cogs turn. But the cogs will not turn FOR YOU until you know how those individual parts connect with each other.

The problem here isn't that we don't understand all the ideas individually; it's that we don't ever put in the effort of connecting one idea to another.

A common area where I notice this is the connection between the evidence and the conclusion. A lot of people will read the evidence, understand it, read the conclusion, understand that - BUT they will not think about "How did the author get to this conclusion with the given evidence?"

>For example: "The research concluded that the difference between people who like jazz music in neighbouring counties A and B is significant. Therefore there must be significant cultural differences between the two counties."

This is a very simple argument I came up with to demonstrate the point I'm making.

In my experience, many of us will not go into the thinking that went into this conclusion, as a simple question: How does the evidence relate to the conclusion?

When we start thinking about it that way, things start to make a lot less sense.

Why cultural differences? Why does the author specifically point out cultural differences?

This line of thought will probably end up being a solution to the problem at hand; maybe it's an assumption the author made, maybe we can weaken the argument by bringing in a fact that would point us away from the cultural differences.

The point of my argument with this post is simple. When your mind works on autopilot, it skips gaps in an argument that would otherwise help us have a deeper understanding of the machine we are working with.

Understanding is supreme.

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Aakkash Singh V90

I love the Verbal Section!