GAMSAT Section I: How to analyse a passage?

Let’s face it: answering GAMSAT MCQs correctly is all about reasoning well. While it is a skill that most Uni students gradually develop during the course of their degree program, you may still need to brush up that skill for GAMSAT. GAMSAT Section I deals with passages from Humanities and the Social Sciences so they are based on verbal reasoning. If you are preparing for GAMSAT and have never had to analyse the given text, it would be really useful to learn some essential tricks of the trade.

Start with reading some good reviews. It could be a review of anything, from the latest Hollywood flick to a work of fiction. Notice how a reviewer READS a text. Any review is essentially a piece of reaction. A good reviewer never simply picks up blocks of text and paraphrases it. Rather he picks up lines from the text and analyses their significance to clear up questions a reader or audience’s mind. When you read a GAMSAT passage, make sure you summarise the main points of the passage, as you go along reading it.

You may have noticed while reading passages that some lines encapsulate and summarise a great deal of the author’s opinion than others. These lines distill the facts, summarise the argument, and leave a major impact on the reader. Make a mental note of these lines as you read the passage. It will help you in understanding the passage more clearly. The MCQs are mostly based on these specific statements. A good analysis always results in a new understanding of the text.

All passages have some kind of a format. A GAMSAT passage may not be clearly divided into the intro, body, and conclusion categories. It may have subtle divisions in the argument expressed. Notice where the author’s thought process is leading to. Is the author taking a confident stand of what he stated at the beginning? Or, is he giving viewpoints to the contrary? What conclusion has he derived from the whole argument? If you can answer these questions well after reading a GAMSAT Section I passage, you have understood the subtle nuances of the text and can answer the multiple choice questions easily.

Learn to recognize each line for what it is. Is the line a statement, a fact, an example or a proof corroborating a statement? As soon as you can break the passage and demystify its structure, understanding it becomes a piece of cake. Literary passages are often littered with symbols, metaphors, allusions, etc. And learning how to analyse them is a different tale altogether.

GAMSAT Section I is never easy, the vast scope it meddles with ensures it isn’t. Hope these techniques will prove to be useful the next time you sit down to solve a GAMSAT Section I test paper.