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GMAT Reading Comprehension questions test to see if you know the meaning behind what you read. The passages you read are 200-400 words long, and you must answer 4 questions related to this passage.

What are these passages about?
Well, the topics are usually obscure so that students won't have a particular advantage over others in terms of knowledge. Here are the three most common types of passages you will read and how to approach them:

Science Passages
Topics include biology, chemistry and medicine. You should approach these passages by doing an inital speed reading or skimming of the text - the goal of doing this is to understand how the passage is structured and to analyze its outline. Then read it again thoroughly. Factual and straightforward, the topic of science will likely be the easiest type of reading comprehension question. You will probably also see several factual questions that can be answered directly from the passage.

Business Passages
Business passages can be structured very difficultly. They will present questions that require you to infer information and even determine the authors' mood or opinion. You must read them extremely slowly and carefully. They may also include compound words that few people have heard of or use in ordinary conversation. Don't feel bad if you run into these terms - they're not too difficult to decipher if you break them down and examine the context in which they are used.

Social Science Passages
These passages deal with topics such as history, politics and geography. These passages are quite similar to business passages, but probably much more enjoyable to read - which is good, because you must read quite slowly in order to infer your answers.

What kind of questions will they ask?

1. Factual
These are the easiest to answer because these facts are explicitly expressed in the passage. You need to be careful because there are often answer choices which may throw you off. Find the right answer in the passage and relate it to the answer choice.

2. Inference
These questions depend on your ability to draw conclusions from other information. It may ask you to make a judgment about the author's opinions, or guess what further conclusions the author might also make. These questions are usually considered the most difficult.

3. Main Idea
These questions test you on a passage's overall theme. Remember - just because all of the possible answers have been discussed in the passage does not mean all of them can be considered the passage's central theme. Here you can usually eliminated answer choices that emphasize factual information, or choices which are too narrow, broad or extreme.

4. Tone
You might be asked to describe a passage's "tone". The tone is much more likely to be positive or neutral than negative. For a science passage, the tone is most likely neutral.

More Tips

Read the question before reading the passage. This approach can help, because when you read the passage you will have a better idea of what you are looking for or focusing on in order to answer that question.

Be careful with fact questions. Fact questions are easy, but only if you make you sure haven't made a silly mistake. Carefully read the data in the passage pertaining to the answer choice several times to make sure.

Don't jump to conclusions. Some questions might use Roman numerals using this answer method:

A) I only
B) II only
C) III only
D) I and II only
E) II and III only

This might throw you off. Facts I and II may be presented very close to each other, but fact III may be buried somewhere else in the text. Check the entire passage to make sure you look at every fact carefully and see if each is correct.

Practice! Tiger Woods didn't make it big in golf by playing hockey!

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