Saturday, April 3, 2010

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.

Thursday, April 1, 2010

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.