As one of the three segments of the GMAT’s verbal section, Critical Reasoning is an important piece of anyone’s pre-test preparation. The issue, however, is that often students have no idea how to prepare for it: CR often seems to fall into that category of things where you just have to magically be smart, at …
Continue reading “Critical Reasoning – The Art of Arguments”
I’ll confess something – I harbour a lot of unresolved annoyance at my maths education. Growing up in the United States, I was subjected to a the type of maths teaching that was essentially focused on telling what to do and how to do it (in a particular way) – but had no focus on …
So far, we’ve taken a look at maths from a conceptual standpoint but I want to take a small break to mention an interesting linguistic fact: the origin of the word Algebra. English is famous for having more words than any other language, with the vast majority of them taken (sometimes forcibly! #imperialism) from other …
One of the concepts that standardised tests use to trouble students is averages, ironically enough. Ironic, because calculating averages is one of the few things from maths classes we tend to retain over time – how could averages ever give us trouble? While calculating averages is easy – simply add everything up and divide by …
One of the most frustrating maths questions you’re likely to get involves relative speeds. It’s not that the concepts are hard – it’s just that you probably never got taught the concepts at all! And relative speed is one area where conceptualisation makes all the difference. To see what I mean, consider the ancient Greek …
One of the most important concepts to learn before taking a standardised exam is how to think about primes – unfortunately, it’s precisely this part of number theory that most students never get a firm grounding in! Getting to grips with primes allows you to find Least Common Multiples and Greatest Common Factors, add and …
