From the course: Preparing for the GMAT

Answer choice traps

From the course: Preparing for the GMAT

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Answer choice traps

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- [Instructor] So one of my favorite GMAT verbal tips to tell students is that the people who write the GMAT have specific predictable ways that they write answer choices to make them either definitively correct or definitively incorrect. There's no in between. So in this video, we'll look at how to recognize some of the ways they make wrong answers look good and right answers look bad. So wrong answers often look good or seem logical. So how do they do this? Well a lot of the times in a wrong answer choice for reading comprehension, you're going to see wording that looks really familiar, maybe even straight from the passage like a copy and paste. So this is often an attempt to make the choice look appealing. Of course then there's going to be something wrong in the choice as well. And then other wrong answer choices are answer choices that you read 'em, they seem logical. They're things that could be true but then when you think about them, hopefully you realize that they don't necessarily have to be true. So if something could be true but doesn't have to be true based on the passage, it's probably speculative and therefore it's probably wrong. So remember wrong answer choices always are going to have something concrete that's wrong with them. You notice sometimes people say, oh pick the best answer choice. Well guess what, four of them are wrong and one of them is right. So there's not really a best one. There's one right one, four wrong ones. So let's have a look at an example here. So if I have this sentence about apple seeds. Apple seeds contain amygdalin, a compound that when it is digested by humans, produces cyanide, a poisonous chemical. So if we were looking at a typical wrong answer choice for this, maybe we would see something like when humans eat apple seeds, the cyanide the seeds originally contained is released into their digestive systems. So can you spot the problem here? We see some familiar stuff like apple seeds, cyanide, digestive systems. But it doesn't say notice in the original that the seeds contain the cyanide. It says when they're digested they produce cyanide. So it didn't originally contain cyanide. Another wrong answer choice that we might see might say something like, people who consume more than a few apple seeds put themselves at risk of fatal cyanide poisoning. Well that would be pretty scary in real life, right? I've eaten apple seeds before and well I didn't die so it's probably not true. And we don't really have support for this in the original sentence. We don't have any way of proving that it actually causes any kind of actual risk to people. So if we think about right answer choices, now the test writers are probably trying to make these look unappealing sometimes. So how would they do that? Well, they might be worded vaguely or in really general terms. So that we read them and we might just be like eh, I don't know, I guess so. You know it's not grabbing us with specific wording or anything that we were particularly looking for. It might be kind of vague and kind of hard to pin down. Or we might just see really an unexpected content or wording that when we see it we're just caught off guard because we didn't expect it. So these ar ways that they would basically take the text and change the wording in a way that's kind of less familiar to us. But ultimately for right answer choices, they're not wrong. In other words, they don't have anything concrete that we can say is incorrect about them. They either say the same thing as the text in different words or, and this is a little harder to catch sometimes, they're things that are unavoidably true based on the text. So let's have a look at this apple seeds sentence again. Here's a typical right answer perhaps. One consequence of eating certain seeds for some mammals is the introduction of a new chemical into their digestive tracts. So I don't know if you think that's correct or not, but it basically is saying the same thing as the original sentence in vague terms. Certain seeds, okay apple seeds. Some mammals, humans are mammals. And new chemical, okay, that's the cyanide. So it's basically kind of making it super vague. It's still saying the same thing. So remember right answers usually either restate the text or are things that are unavoidably true based on the text. Whereas wrong answers have at least one thing in them that isn't necessarily in the text or true based on the text. These right answers that we see tend to be sometimes vaguely or unexpectedly worded. And then wrong answers tend to have familiar or specific wording from the passage. So these tips should come in handy next time you're staring at answer choices on the GMAT.

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