What part of the passage to focus on in RC?

Most students who struggle with Reading Comprehension share a common issue: they focus equally on all words in the passage. Some words, however, are not as important as others, and in order to improve our comprehension we must first learn to identify which words we should focus our energy on.   Most people read at a constant pace (e.g. 40 words per minute). If your pace is constant, you are focusing evenly on all words in the passage. Instead, try and use a varying pace: speed through the detailed parts of the passage (you can always go back to those later when you get a detailed question) and slow down almost to a complete stop (in some cases do stop) when you see structural words or phrases. For example, consider the following phrase as part of a passage: this assumption has led to the conclusion that. Notice that you have no idea whether this passage is about Geology, Biology, or Economics; there are no details in the phrase, but the structural words assumption, led, and conclusion would cause me to stop reading. You don’t want to continue until you are confident that you understand what the assumption and the conclusion are, and how one could reasonably reach the conclusion based on the assumption. Other structural words or phrases could include: thus, however, because, but, therefore, having said that, nevertheless, be that as it may, as well as, not, theory, hypothesis, since, etc. Can you tell what they all have in common? These words and phrases all carry a heavy dose of meaning without providing any details. If you practice this idea of reading at a varying pace, you will begin to notice that often you can predict what the next paragraph will be about. For example, if a paragraph ends with the phrase it has been frequently assumed, but not proved, that (notice again I don’t know what the passage is about), one might predict that the next paragraph will launch into an investigation of whether that assumption is true (and the author is probably going to argue that it’s not). Did you notice that we started the previous paragraph with a if x, y construction, followed by an example? This is what is meant by focusing on structure! Key Takeaways: If you spend 4 minutes reading a long passage on the CAT, try spending most of that time focusing on structure (even though details account for the vast majority of the words). When you stop to consider the implications of a structural phrase, don’t feel like you’re wasting your time “ it will always be time well spent. This  is just as relevant for Critical Reasoning as it is for Reading Comprehension; in fact, it may help you with Sentence Correction as well! You will often be able to predict what the passage will be about by the time you’ve finished the first paragraph (arguing for/against a theory, describing a phenomenon objectively, etc.).