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Struggling with GMAT CR? Learn to Find Assumptions!

GMAT Tip of the Week for the Week of March 11, 2013

This week’s GMAT tip* concerns GMAT Critical Reasoning questions, and specifically the importance of finding assumptions in answering many GMAT CR question types. This short video explains this tip in more detail while covering a sample GMAT critical reasoning argument:

GMAT Tip of the Week: GMAT critical reasoning questions come in many different forms, but a majority of them are more easily answered if you can master one important skill: Identifying Assumptions. Some questions flat-out ask you to identify the assumption that the author must be making in order to draw his stated conclusion. Other questions are more subtle, like asking you to choose an answer choice that strengthens or weakens the author’s argument. Yet, even for questions like those, the answer lies in first identifying the underlying assumption. After all, to strengthen an argument, you support the assumption, while to weaken an argument, you attack (or weaken) the author’s assumption.

It’s not always easy to find the unstated assumption in an argument; that’s why we spend so much time covering common GMAT argument patterns in our video lesson “GMAT Critical Reasoning – Part 2” because we know that if you can identify the type of argument the author is using, it’s that much easier to identify the assumption he is necessarily making. Still, it’s worth the practice of learning to accurately identify GMAT assumption because doing so will put you in a great position to get more right answers on the GMAT verbal section — and ultimately, to dominate the GMAT!

* Each week, one of the GMAT experts at Dominate the GMAT shares a valuable GMAT test-taking tip, strategy, trick, or content item. These tips are designed to augment your GMAT study program and provide you with additional information that will help you improve your GMAT score.