The Verbal Reasoning section of the GMAT measures students' ability to understand, analyze, and evaluate written texts. This section consists of 23 questions and lasts 45 minutes. The questions are in multiple-choice format and are divided into the following two main categories:
Reading Comprehension
In this question type, candidates are presented with short or long passages and asked questions about them. The passages are generally academic in nature and are drawn from a variety of fields such as business, social sciences, and humanities. Students' abilities to identify the main idea, supporting details, and the author's purpose, as well as to draw logical inferences from the text, are assessed.
Critical Reasoning
In Critical Reasoning questions, students are presented with an argument and tested on their ability to strengthen, weaken, or evaluate that argument or to draw logical conclusions. This question type measures critical thinking and logical analysis skills.
Important Note: Sentence Correction questions have been removed in the GMAT Focus Edition. This change allows the exam to focus more on critical thinking and analytical skills.
Verbal Reasoning Sample Questions
Examples of questions that may appear in the Verbal Reasoning section are as follows:
This passage was written in 1984. Note: Both questions 1 and 2 refer to this passage.
It is now possible to hear a recording of Caruso’s singing that is far superior to any made during his lifetime. A decades-old wax-cylinder recording of this great operatic tenor has been digitized, and the digitized signal has been processed by computer to remove the extraneous sound, or “noise,” introduced by the now “ancient” wax-cylinder recording process.
Although this digital technique needs improvement, it represents a new and superior way of recording and processing sound which overcomes many of the limitations of analog recording. In analog recording systems, the original sound is represented as a continuous waveform created by variations in the sound’s amplitude over time. When analog playback systems reproduce this waveform, however, they invariably introduce distortions. First, the waveform produced during playback differs somewhat from the original waveform. Second, the medium that stores the analog recording creates noise during playback which gets added to the recorded sounds.
Digital recordings, by contrast, reduce the original sound to a series of discrete numbers that represent the sound’s waveform. Because the digital playback system “reads” only numbers, any noise and distortion that may accumulate during storage and manipulation of the digitized signal will have little effect: as long as the numbers remain recognizable, the original waveform will be reconstructed with little loss in quality. However, because the waveform is continuous, while its digital representation is composed of discrete numbers, it is impossible for digital systems to avoid some distortion. One kind of distortion, called “sampling error,” occurs if the sound is sampled (i.e., its amplitude is measured) too infrequently, so that the amplitude changes more than one quantum (the smallest change in amplitude measured by the digital system) between samplings. In effect, the sound is changing too quickly for the system to record it accurately. A second form of distortion is “quantizing error,” which arises when the amplitude being measured is not a whole number of quanta, forcing the digital recorder to round off. Over the long term, these errors are random, and the noise produced (a background buzzing) is similar to analog noise except that it only occurs when recorded sounds are being reproduced.
Question 1:
According to the passage, one of the ways in which analog recording systems differ from digital recording systems is that analog systems…
Answer Choices:
A. Can be used to reduce background noise in old recordings.
B. Record the original sound as a continuous waveform.
C. Distort the original sound somewhat.
D. Can avoid introducing extraneous and nonmusical sounds.
E. Can reconstruct the original waveform with little loss in quality.
Question 2:
Which of the following can be inferred from the passage about the digital approach to the processing of sound?
Answer Choices:
A. It was developed in competition with wax-cylinder recording technology.
B. It has resulted in the first distortion-free playback system.
C. It has been extensively applied to nonmusical sounds.
D. It cannot yet process music originally recorded on analog equipment.
E. It is not yet capable of reprocessing old recordings in a completely distortion-free manner.
Critical Reasoning Sample Questions
Question 3:
Although migraine headaches are believed to be caused by food allergies, putting patients on diets that eliminate those foods to which the patients have been demonstrated to have allergic migraine reactions frequently does not stop headaches. Obviously, some other cause of migraine headaches besides food allergies must exist. Which of the following, if true, would most weaken the conclusion above?
Answer Choices:
A. Many common foods elicit an allergic response only after several days, making it very difficult to observe links between specific foods patients eat and headaches they develop.
B. Food allergies affect many people who never develop the symptom of migraine headaches.
C. Many patients report that the foods that cause them migraine headaches are among the foods that they most enjoy eating.
D. Very few patients have allergic migraine reactions as children and then live migraine-free adult lives once they have eliminated from their diets foods to which they have been demonstrated to be allergic.
E. Very rarely do food allergies cause patients to suffer a symptom more severe than that of migraine headaches.
Question 4:
A factory was trying out a new process for producing one of its products, with the goal of reducing production costs. A trial production run using the new process showed a fifteen percent reduction in costs compared with past performance using the standard process. The production managers therefore concluded that the new process did produce a cost savings. Which of the following, if true, casts most doubt on the production managers’ conclusion?
Answer Choices:
A. In the cost reduction project that eventually led to the trial of the new process, production managers had initially been seeking cost reductions of fifty percent.
B. Analysis of the trial of the new process showed that the cost reduction during the trial was entirely attributable to a reduction in the number of finished products rejected by quality control.
C. While the trial was being conducted, production costs at the factory for a similar product, produced without benefit of the new process, also showed a fifteen percent reduction.
D. Although some of the factory’s managers have been arguing that the product is outdated and ought to be redesigned, the use of the new production process does not involve any changes in the finished product.
E. Since the new process differs from the standard process only in the way in which the stages of production are organized and ordered, the cost of the materials used in the product is the same in both processes.
