GMAT Tip of the Week

Cleanse Your Palate

(This is one of a series of GMAT tips that we offer on our blog.)

If you're one of our many American readers, you're most likely salivating at the though of Thursday's Thanksgiving meal, already planning how to make room on your plate for a drumstick, a scoop of potatoes carefully depressed in to a self-containing gravy bowl, a portion-and-a-half of Aunt Joan's sweet potato casserole, and enough vegetables to round out the plate to not appear entirely unconcerned with eating healthy. Ultimately, your carefully planned plate will all blend together in to one pile of mashed-everything, with gravy running in to cranberry sauce that is essentially a paste holding together kernels of corn and pieces of marshmallow from the already-devoured sweet potatoes.  But I digress...

Our more sophisticated readers may scoff at the above imagery, preferring to think of their true favorite meal of the year - a lovely sushi dinner on the outskirts of wine country, featuring small bites and sips of a variety of pleasures for the taste buds.  Those fine diners will think not only of the individual tastes as a contrast to the "it all goes to the same place" Thanksgiving plate, but of the clever mechanisms for keeping the tastes of sushi and wine separate - the ginger leaves and soda crackers that cleanse the sophisticated palate to make appreciation of the next morsel that much easier.

How can you, as a GMAT examinee, learn from the sophisticated palates of your counterparts?

Many a test-taker has lamented the problem that "I can usually narrow the answer choices down to two, but don't guess much better than 50% from there."  The reason for this is often akin to the Thanksgiving dinner plate:

When you read a verbal question thoroughly enough to narrow the answer choices to two, at the point of your decision between those two choices, four of the last five sentences that you have read are incorrect answer choices.  Often by that point, you've lost track to some extent of the question being asked and the information that would build toward a correct answer.  Quite simply, the answer choices and the question itself start to run together.

To combat this, think of the sushi eater or wine taster who eats a piece of ginger or a soda cracker in between samples to clear the taste of the previous item in order to better appreciate the subtlety of the next.  If you can "cleanse your mental palate" by refreshing yourself on the question and treating it as a new item, but one with only two answers, you'll be that much more able to appreciate the differences between your remaining answers in clearer context of the question itself, without the other answer choices overwhelming your consciousness in to a poor decision.

To summarize, when you've narrowed your answer choices to two, briefly reread the question (which ought not take too long, as it's a refresher of what you've already read) to better focus on the task at hand, and you'll find your decision to be a clearer one.  After you've successfully completed the test, you can enjoy a celebratory feast in whichever manner suits your fancy.

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