Yayyy!!! It's Sunday :)

Today's plan is to finish the advanced part of MGMAT FDP and attempt FDP questions from OG-10 (as much as possible) in blocks/bunches. And then, planning to start MGMAT GEO and try to finish Chapters 1 & 2 as soon as possible but with understanding the concepts thoroughly. Apart from studying, I'll be trolling around web & forums and watch some good movie :).

Listening to songs has become kind of daily routine. I don't know why but I listen to Old Indian & Pakistani (Lata, Rafi, Masood Rana, Mahindera Kapoor, Mukesh, Kishore, Mehdi Hassan, Ustaad Bade Ghulam Ali Khan and list goes on) songs as well as Ghazals.

Percents Done :) (Applied Percents will be done when doing Word Translations)

Percents done :) and now I am going to make this weakness as a strength of mine. But, still need to do a lot of practice and also have to go through Applied Percents (will be covered in Word Translations). MGMAT has done a great job to explain difficult & twisted concepts in an easy way. I think i am not doing practice that much but I have some job responsibilities to take care of and then will be doing practice, practice, and practice :). For now got to practice questions related to the Number Properties and FDP. After having a firm grasp on them, will move forward to the next topics. Also, have to look at RC topic too meanwhile (CR Notes by whiplash21, a gmatclub member). I wish there were sub-categories in BTG Practice Questions (there are categories) to practice Percents, but I'll attempt them after going through all the topics.

Today Plan

Today's plan is to study MGMAT FDP, especially Percents as this one gives me hard time when it comes to complex percents questions.After, doing FDP will head to OG's for some practice on these topics. Going to use error log to record my progress and then evaluate that where do I stand. And then practice the questions from BTG & GMATClub by using tag searching and doing BTG Practice Questions as well :).

I need motivation to keep doing whatever I plan to do. Today is sunday and will be going out with friends but before that gotta do all of the above and more if possible. Also, will review these topics from GMATClub's Math Book as well.

Video Testimonial --> Creative & Fun (Keep it up BTG Team)

 Last night, it was my first time to do a video testimonial (rather first time recorded video of myself) on BTG. At first, I was skeptical of doing that but after looking at others coming and speaking of "Why you love Beaththegmat?" within 15 seconds. I gave it a shot and guess what, it was fun to do :).

I have to say that BTG Team is a group of smart and creative people. They always come up with new and fun to do ideas. And, there was also a great chance for 100K Challenge players to boost their scores vertically. I've already won BTG Practice Questions and I am very thankful to the BTG team for giving me such a valuable prize. Thank you! BTG (keep on surprising and helping :) )

GMAT -Quant: Gmatclub.com's Number Properties-I test

Just attempted GMATClub Number Properties-I test from GMATClub's tests section. I have to say the questions were tough & tricky, after going through Number Properties topics, I thought I would be good to go. But, it did hit the nail hard in the head. I have to practice more and more, and also have to review the topics once more. This time I'll review carefully and will try to note down the concepts/formulas/tricks that are important.
And here are my results:

 So, now I have to be serious and get a firm grasp on the concepts and do lot of practice and solve more questions from Forums. Also thinking of attempting BeatTheGmat's Practice Questions (related to Number Properties)

GMAT -Quant: Number Properties study progress

I've started studying NUMBER PROPERTIES section from GMAT Club's Math Book (almost every concept is there and compiled it in a .pdf file :) ). I have gone through following topics;
INTEGERS
Evens & Odds, Irrational Numbers, Positives & Negatives, Prime Numbers, Factors--> Finding The Number of Factors of an Integer, Finding the Sum of the Factors of an Integer, GCD/GCF (Greatest Common Divisor/Factor), LCM (Least/Smallest Common Multiple).
Perfect Square, Divisibility Rules, Factorials (Trailing Zeros, Finding the Number of of Powers of a Prime Number p in n!, Finding the Power of Non-prime in n!), Consecutive Integers, Evenly Spaced Sets.

FRACTIONS:
Fractional Representation, Converting Improper Functions, Reciprocal, Operation on Fractions, Decimal Representation, Converting Decimals to Fractions (recurring decimal, mixed-recurring decimal' conversions), Rounding, Ratios & Proportions (Invertendo, Alternendo, Componendo, Dividendo, Compo & Divi), Exponents (Operations with Expos, Fractions as Expos, Expos Equations, Expos & Divisibility), Last Digit of a Product, Last Digit of a Power (How to determine them is important), Roots (Rules and remember the values of the roots of first 10 digits), PEMDAS (Parenthesis, Exponents, Multiplication/Division, Addition/Subtraction).

I'll try to attempt questions on the forums (http://gmatclub.com & http://beatthegmat.com) by searching the questions related to the above topics by using tags (tag searching is amazing). Thinking of attempting questions related to these topics from OG12 (A bit skeptical and would need suggestions here :)).

The next topic would be Percents (important topic), will try to cover it asap and solve the questions related to this topic :). Or maybe, after going through Percents, I'll attempt questions.

Also, went through first 4 chapters of MGMAT Number Properties (got MGMAT books from a friend and don't have CATs yet) in parallel.
Chapter1: Divisibility & Primes
Chapter2: Odds & Evens
Chapter3: Positives & Negatives
Chapter4: Consecutive Integers
I have done these topics from GMAT Club Math Book already but do have an overview on these topics from MGMAT Book and then solve their In Action Problems at the end of these chapters.
Also, will try to go through some CR section of Verbal. Trying to mix up the preparation and do Quant + Verbal each week but more focus on Quant yet (just a go through Verbal for the time being).
Well, that's all for today.

Any thoughts or suggestions???
Happy prepping :)

I am back

It's been a long time since I posted here as was too busy with work and after that one of the deadliest flood hit our area and had to go back to village, so that could help my family to save our homes and the property. Luckily, our village survived but all of our farms were destroyed (cotton & sugar fields), but we are thankful to Almighty that our lives and homes were saved. I remember my father's face when he heard about the farms because a farmer looks after his farms & lands as much as he does for his children.

But others were affected more than us because farms were their only source of income because two of our family members (me & my brother) have their job as an alternate source of income. We were already supporting our family but now is the time to support them as much as we can. And also, support others who suffered a lot from the flood. Now all of that is over but still we can't cultivate our lands as the river has made his way between our village and our lands. And, this would be soon over too and we would be able to cultivate our lands.

That being said, we await for the time when we would start cultivation our lands again. Meanwhile, I've come back due to my job responsibilities but the project is over and I got time to start prepping for GMAT. So, I am back now and all set to embark on my journey to "Ace the GMAT" :). In next post I'll start sharing my journey :).

My Quotes

My Quotes
These are kind of quotes, which come to my mind with the passage of time. These are originally by me (of course the idea can be same as described by many).

“Always be natural as you are a part of Nature; that’s why more you deviate from nature more you create problems and complexities for yourself and ultimately get hurt”.

“Don’t stray from Nature or you will be lost in the deep ocean of darkness”.

“Be yourself; don’t pretend to be someone else, because if you pretend so you’ll never be satisfied”.

“I am Me, I am unique; I am the one who can’t be someone else and I am the one someone else can’t be”.

“Act on what you know and know what you don’t know”.

Still more to come with the passage of time. I do love poetry but I know more of it in Urdu rather than English. Maybe I have to read English poems (I did read in school but don't remember it anymore).

Who am I? What am I?

Who am I? What am I?
The most difficult question, let’s brainstorm:

•  I am a spirit (made of a spirit).
• I am a recipient (of knowledge).
• I am the truth (an example of truth, living truth).
• I am a messenger.
• I am a dirty liquid (time for a spirit to come into the world).
• I am a mixture of flesh and blood.
• I am a creature.
• I am a human (have emotions and a heart).
• I am a servant (e.g. to serve the purpose of life, to serve others, to serve the creator).
• I am weak (depends on others e.g. Parents and God).
• I am a son (An apple of my Parents’ eye).
• I am love (union of two souls).
• I am a brother.
• I am an observer and a learner.
• I am intelligent (I think everyone is intelligent).
• I am fun.
• I am pain in the *** (who doesn’t know what is it like to respect others and is care free).
• I am silly.
• I am naughty.
• I am careless (worked on it and made much progress).
• I am arrogant (worked on it and changed a lot).
• I am irresponsible (same as above).
• I am a looser (because of carelessness and irresponsibility but not anymore).
• I am bad.
• I am miserable (sad and down because of failure. Changed a lot).
• I am immature (messed up, instead of focusing and letting it go. Changed alot).
• I am emotional and sensitive.
•  I am a lover.
• I am a dreamer (If you don’t dream then how can you make them come true? So dream and dream BIG).
• I am a seeker (seek truth, seek true-self, seek spiritual teacher).
• I am a believer.
• I am spiritual.
• I am a student.
• I am a transition (turning into new me, a transformation from arrogant to humble, from irresponsible to responsible, and from immature to mature etc.).
• I am a life experience (getting through life changing experience, and learning from experience and mistakes).
• I am free and independent.
• I am in process of self-awareness (starting to know myself because of meditation).
• I am self-motivated.
• I am forgiving (forgive my self, and forgive others).
• I am humble and patient (a serene and down to earth person).
• I am rational (now never going to blame myself, instead going to learn and then move on).
• I am a joyful person.
• I am a good friend.
• I am a good person (happy to know that some people do think so).
• I am mature (according to someone sometime it makes me boringJ).
• I am a responsible person.
• I am strong.
• I am a fighter and I struggle (Simply not going to give up, and going to defeat my weaknesses for sure).
• I am a confident person now.
• I am optimistic.
• I am lucky (to be blessed with many opportunities with which many people are not).
• I am unique (I am not someone else, and no one else is me).
• I am sympathetic.
• I am caring.
• I am a loving person.
• I am honest.
• I am straight-forward.
• I am romantic (Wow! Girls do think so and surprisingly they do think that I’ll be a good husband. It makes me wonder and at the same time laugh at myself).
• I am sincere.
• I am one with good intentions (Thank God, that others do think so).
• I am a reasonable person.
• I am wisdom.
• I am respectful (I do respect others).
• I am a social person (Trying to be one and yet need much more work to do )
• I am adaptable.
• I am a natural person.
• I am a professional.
• I am a quick learner.
• I am a thinker.
• I am a team-player.
• I am a leader (leadership fascinates me. I lead by example and believe in “leading by example”).
• I am a challenging person.
• I am trustworthy (people do think I am trustworthy, it was surprising but at the same time good to know).
• I never hate others (but do hate bad habits and bad things. Even, I never did hate my enemies).
• I get along easily.
• I am a mystery.
• I am a curious person.
• I am a creative person.
• I am an explorer.
• I am athletic (I like sports especially soccer).
• I am passionate.
• I am a good adviser (never give bad advice to others).
• I am successful (after a failure changed a lot and until now have been successful in what I do, with the grace of God. I am not a looser anymore.).
• I am not afraid anymore (Not even afraid of failure, I’ve seen it and have fought it. I do fear but only God).
• I am a thankful person (especially to God and those who have helped me).
• I am in search of “Ultimate Satisfaction and True Happiness”.

That’s all I could think of now and I think I wrote a lot. Wow! Thinking process helps a lot and maybe that’s what differentiates us from others. The ability to think is a key essence of intuition.

These were 86 points to describe me, these points are a result of brainstorming.

Atif's Brainstorming

Yesterday, I was trying to brainstorm and see how Brainstorming helps us to come up with ideas and plan ahead. And, that's what Brainstorming yielded into:

• A little Thought comes to mind and then leads a human to a process.

• A Process starts and spans in human mind in a cyclic manner.

• Imagination and Intuition starts Brainstorming (Thinking Process starts).

• Questions come to mind (What, Why, Where, When, and How?).

• Questions lead to Curiosity.

• Curiosity leads to Search.

• Search for Answers, which lead to knowledge.

• First get little knowledge but prominent and authentic.

• Then, act on what I know and know what I don’t know.

• Knowledge leads to Wisdom.

• Wisdom makes us human and makes us stand out from other creatures (also from other human).

• Search leads to clear answers, with the help of knowledge and wisdom.

• Clear Answers lead to productive Intentions and clear Plans.

• Curiosity, Knowledge, Wisdom with good Intentions and clear set of Plans show you a Right Path.

• Right Path leads to a Destination.

• But what is a Destination?

• There are many destinations when you embark on a journey; these are little destinations which lie on the way.

• These little destinations lead to an Ultimate Supreme Destination.

• But what is an “Ultimate Supreme Destination”?

 This is amazing to see what brainstorming leads to. I could never come up with all of the above points if I had not done Brainstorming. And, now I know how much does it help and I am going to brainstorm from now on no matter what task I have to do. Brainstorming does help us to come up with innovative and amazing ideas and help us to plan ahead.


I am still in process of Brainstorming and I yet have to come up with the answer to the last Bullet Point. I'll post whenever I'll have time and also I have to write about what happens when you reach you Ultimate Destination and how does it affect a person.
Cheers and happy Brainstorming!

Answer to "Is it ok to do OG questions at the end of each Manhattan GMAT SC guide's chapter"

Following is the reply by gparmar16-->www.gmatclub.com to my question "Is it ok to do OG questions at the end of each Manhattan GMAT SC guide's chapter".

  

It can't be stressed enough how effective the MGMAT SC book and its strategies are for tackling the sentence correction portion of the GMAT. I highly recommend continuing what you are doing. Performing MGMAT questions at the end of every chapter along with the assigned problems they give. 

It is true that many of the questions the MGMAT assign have multiple concepts that are tested. Unfortunately any higher level SC question you will get on the GMAT test will have multiple errors. It is frustrating tackling concepts you haven't covered yet, but note the ones you continue to get wrong (before you hit that chapter in the book of course). When you do hit that chapter you can just focus a bit more, knowing you have trouble with those concepts. You may even be able to clear up all the trouble spots on your first run through the book.

Also great idea on getting a list of OG10th questions from the 2nd edition. This is what I did so I didn't exhaust the questions from the OG12th edition. Besides OG10th has twice as many questions. I also recommend answering every OG questions the way MGMAT lays out at the end of their chapters. Identifying the errors in each of the wrong answer choices, highlighting subject-verbs, pronouns and their respective antecedents, etc.

What is life?

This morning, I was wondering what is life? What does it mean? What is the definition? etc. So I searched the definition of life on Google and found following results.
Definition of life:

• a characteristic state or mode of living; "social life"; "city life"; "real life"
• the experience of being alive; the course of human events and activities; "he could no longer cope with the complexities of life"
• the course of existence of an individual; the actions and events that occur in living; "he hoped for a new life in Australia"; "he wanted to live his own life without interference from others"
• animation: the condition of living or the state of being alive; "while there's life there's hope"; "life depends on many chemical and physical processes"
• the period during which something is functional (as between birth and death); "the battery had a short life"; "he lived a long and happy life"
• the period between birth and the present time; "I have known him all his life"
• the period from the present until death; "he appointed himself emperor for life"
• a living person; "his heroism saved a life"
• liveliness: animation and energy in action or expression; "it was a heavy play and the actors tried in vain to give life to it"
• living things collectively; "the oceans are teeming with life"
• the organic phenomenon that distinguishes living organisms from nonliving ones; "there is no life on the moon"
• biography: an account of the series of events making up a person's life
• a motive for living; "pottery was his life"
• life sentence: a prison term lasting as long as the prisoner lives; "he got life for killing the guard" 

Well it's a complex topic and it's not easy to define Life specifically. I'll post my thoughts about life and what does I think of life. I am a spiritual person, so my thoughts would be much related to spiritual aspects of life.
Here are the meanings of life from www.biology-online.org:

Life
Origin: as. Lf; akin to D. Lijf body, g. Leib body, MHG. Lp life, body, OHG. Lb life, Icel. Lf, life, body, Sw. Lif, dan. Liv, and E. Live, v. See live, and cf. Alive.
1. The state of being which begins with generation, birth, or germination, and ends with death; also, the time during which this state continues; that state of an animal or plant in which all or any of its organs are capable of performing all or any of their functions; used of all animal and vegetable organisms.
2. Of human being: The union of the soul and body; also, the duration of their union; sometimes, the deathless quality or existence of the soul; as, man is a creature having an immortal life. She shows a body rather than a life. (Shak)
3. (Science: philosophy) The potential principle, or force, by which the organs of animals and plants are started and continued in the performance of their several and cooperative functions; the vital force, whether regarded as physical or spiritual.

Well, all of the above was just the definition of life rather than the philosophy of life. I'll put my random thoughts about "What is life?" in multiple posts because this topic is complex as well as broad in its meaning. And also will post whenever I'll have random thoughts of "What is life?". In next post regarding this topic I'll write my thoughts with some examples.

My Question on GMATClub regarding my Manhattan GMAT SC guide study

Well, below is the question I posted on http://www.gmatclub.com regarding my GMAT SC study plan/preparation. I'll post the useful replies or comments when posted by other members.
Actually, I have studied MGMAT SC 4th edition's 4 chapters, and now I am on 5th Chapter (Pronoun) and the previous ones were S-V Agreement and Parallelism. After studying Chapter 3 (S-V agreement), I solved problem sets at the end of the chapter and also attempted OG 12 S-V questions and got 9 out of 11 correct, which is equal to I think 82% (after putting results in Awesome Error Log). Average time spent on each questions was about 2.7 minutes. I didn't have problem with identifying and solving S-V issues in those questions, and could jot down to 2 choices within 15 seconds but after that all of the time was spent on choosing between 2 choices (Actually had problem with pronoun and parallelism or other topics instead of S-V). Maybe, the reason was that I haven't gone through other topics yet.
After S-V, studied the chapter 4 Parallelism and now thinking whether I should attempt OG questions (especially at this time) or not? Also, thinking of whether to do OG for next chapters or to do not.

Whether I should attempt OG questions at the end of each chapter or not? What do you guys suggest?

By the way, this time I plan on attempting OG 10 questions instead of OG 12 (reserve it for later use when done with MGMAT SC or when completed all OG 10 questions), only if you guys suggest to attempt OG at this time.

Innovation or humiliation?

Innovation or humiliation?
Sometimes I really wonder what's going on with this world. Why do people always go to evil side of the technology and use it to waste their times instead of getting the most out of the innovation & technology. Total waste of time "sigh". Especially, our kids and teenagers to whom it's very dangerous have easy access to these kind of stuff. There must be some regulations to use the technology in a right way. Hope our authorities do implement regulations to restrict the access to irrelevant people.

SC-->MGMAT

Just started, MGMAT SC chapter 1, I gotta say this book is must have for SC ( Sentence Correction). Very well written & organized, it wasn't boring going through the chapter. I do have a Grammar book as a helping book for verbal but things like Brevity, Style and Redundancy are not discussed in grammar books. MGMAT does cover these things and it really makes a lot easier for us to identify clear concise and succinct answer choice. After looking at Kaplan Premier and visiting some forums like gmatclub.com, beatthegmat.com and manahattangmat.com's forum It's clear that we must follow the patterns as follows when dealing with SC questions.
1.Correctness
2. Clarity
If an answer choice has a technical grammatical error like Verb/Tense, Subject/Verb Agreement, Pronouns, Modifiers, Parallelism and Comparison related errors can not be accepted at all even if a sentence looks wordy or awkward. Clarity matters when we have to choose between two grammatical correct choices then should go for the clear, short and succinct one.
And yea Correctness can be subdivided into two categories,
1.Correctness related to Technical Grammar Rules ( mentioned in paragraph above )
2.Correctness of Idioms and voice ( Active voice is always preferred over passive voice) and also gotta take care of Mood ( Subjunctive & Indicative )
I think that's enough for today...enough studying..now gotta listen to some nice music yayyy