What Reading Comprehension tests
Reading Comprehension gives you a passage of a few paragraphs and several questions about it. They ask for the main idea, the purpose of a paragraph, a detail, an inference the passage supports, the author’s attitude, or how the author would judge a new case. Passages come from business, the social and natural sciences, and the humanities, and none requires background knowledge. The skill under test is reading for structure: what the passage claims and how each paragraph serves that claim.
How the GMAT Focus scores it
Reading Comprehension shares the 23-question Verbal section with Critical Reasoning. The exam serves a passage’s questions one after another, so one misread passage can cost several answers in a row. The section produces a Verbal score from 60 to 90 that GMAC weights equally with Quant and Data Insights.
Timing rule of thumb
Plan on 2 to 3 minutes to read a passage, then about 1 minute per question. Read once for structure and note each paragraph’s role in a few words. Go back to the text for details, but never reread the whole passage.
The two most common traps
1.The word-match choice
A wrong choice reuses phrases from the passage inside a claim the passage never makes. Match the meaning of the lines you found, not their vocabulary.
2.Too narrow, too broad
On main-idea questions, one choice covers a single paragraph and another adds a conclusion the author never drew. The right answer covers the whole passage and goes no further.