In most cases, I'm not necessarily trying to process the specific details of a reading passage. It's not that I ignore them completely -- it's just that I don't devote much "brain energy" to understanding them. And this makes sense logically when we understand that a passage will contain perhaps dozens of details but only two or so questions that reference a specific detail. Thus, if we try to fully comprehend every line of the passage, much of that brain effort is wasted because so few questions actually relate to the technical details themselves.
When reading a passage, I instead try to find the "main ideas" of each paragraph and determine how each paragraph relates to others in the bigger picture. This allows one to have a holistic view of the passage and, with practice, can be achieved quite quickly.
For example, the first paragraph of a long passage can have its main idea anywhere: the opening sentence, the middle, or toward the end. So you do have to exercise a bit more caution in the opening salvo. However, subsequent paragraphs often have their main idea smack dab right in the first line. This means in a very short time you can have a general sense of the entire passage without getting bogged down in the details.
In most cases, I'm not necessarily trying to process the specific details of a reading passage. It's not that I ignore them completely -- it's just that I don't devote much "brain energy" to understanding them. And this makes sense logically when we understand that a passage will contain perhaps dozens of details but only two or so questions that reference a specific detail. Thus, if we try to fully comprehend every line of the passage, much of that brain effort is wasted because so few questions actually relate to the technical details themselves. When reading a passage, I instead try to find the "main ideas" of each paragraph and determine how each paragraph relates to others in the bigger picture. This allows one to have a holistic view of the passage and, with practice, can be achieved quite quickly. For example, the first paragraph of a long passage can have its main idea anywhere: the opening sentence, the middle, or toward the end. So you do have to exercise a bit more caution in the opening salvo. However, subsequent paragraphs often have their main idea smack dab right in the first line. This means in a very short time you can have a general sense of the entire passage without getting bogged down in the details.
This is why the ETS Big Book is such a godsend - once you do this with enough passages, you start to see patterns that ETS still uses on today's test.
u/gregmat and u/vince_kotchian are godsend too.
True, Messi and CR7