CARS Comprehension

CARS is split into two major skill categories comprehending the passage and answering the questions. If we don’t understand what a passage is saying we can’t answer the questions so we will begin by building our ability to comprehend. We will be walking through the full comprehension progression this way you will have a chance to

Get to the Main Idea

Our aim when reading is to focus on pulling out the main idea from a passage. This is often more challenging than it sounds since authors use convoluted sentence structures, obscure vocabulary, and confusing metaphors and analogies. Thankfully, a lot of language is redundant.

Main ideas are expressed in very few words. Sentences contain more words than this. Why? Readability.

If this whole course was written in the same style as above you would probably get tired of reading this pretty quickly. While a lot of language is really, terribly, awfully redundant it gives authors multiple ways of expressing their ideas. Whether they are trying to arouse a particular emotion in the reader or convince them of their idea using logic.

This element of writing is both a blessing and a curse in CARS. It means that many of the passages will repeat themselves so if we didn’t catch onto the main idea the first time around we have another chance. It also means that the passages will have complicated and often convoluted sentences that can obfuscate their meaning.

Strikethrough

Strikethrough is the first step towards helping us simplify these complicated sentences. Allowing us to get at the basic ideas or arguments the author is trying to convey.

It’s time-consuming and not test friendly so we won’t be using it on our actual exam. Instead, our goal is to increase our ability to comprehend not by “reading more”, but by understanding more as we read. Our end goal is to understand the text as we read without pausing to cross anything out.

Worked Example

The best way to see how this strategy work is to see it in action. Start by reading the expert from “The Zombie as Barometer of Capitalist Anxiety” by D.T. Robb.

Original

“The modern incarnation of the zombie, as seen strewn across pop culture horror novels and films in ever-increasing numbers, is easily recognized and radically different from its historical roots; any member of our modern Western culture can spot the gray, often rotting flesh, the black eyes, the disheveled appearance, the shuffling gait, the wretched moaning, and, of course, the bloody mouths flecked with fresh flesh and detritus. However, the zombie goes beyond cheap thrills; zombies, as well as other variations of horror monsters, represent a fear that pervades society as a whole, a collective nervousness of destruction at the hands of a seemingly invulnerable foe.”

Yup, that paragraph was only two sentences long. Two very long sentences at that. In those two sentences the author covered two pretty simple ideas

1. Modern zombies are different than past ones
2. Zombies represent the fear of being destroyed.

If you didn’t get that from the paragraph don’t worry try reading this version of the text instead.

Crossed Out

The modern incarnation of the zombie, as seen strewn across pop culture horror novels and films in ever-increasing numbers, is easily recognized and radically different from its historical roots; any member of our modern Western culture can spot the gray, often rotting flesh, the black eyes, the dishevelled appearance, the shuffling gait, the wretched moaning, and, of course, the bloody mouths flecked with fresh flesh and detritus. However, the zombie goes beyond cheap thrills; zombies, as well as other variations of horror monsters, represent a fear that pervades society as a whole, a collective nervousness of destruction at the hands of a seemingly invulnerable foe.

First I removed most of the details, typically these are adjectives, but they could be descriptions as well.

“…gray, often rotting flesh, the black eyes, the disheveled appearance, the shuffling gait, the wretched moaning, and, of course, the bloody mouths flecked with fresh flesh and detritus.”

and then the moveable elements, usually found between commas.

“…, as seen strewn across pop culture horror novels and films in ever-increasing numbers,…”

Then I can read what is left and distill down the sentences into much simpler versions.

1. Modern zombies are different than past ones
2. Zombies represent the fear of being destroyed.

Block-Out

We have seen how crossing out helps us get at what is and isn’t important in writing. It was time consuming though and the whole point was to figure out what the author was trying to say. We did this ironically by focusing on what wasn’t important. In blocking we flip this idea around and instead pick out what is important.

Why Didn’t We Start Here?

Why didn’t we just start by looking for the important stuff? It is usually a bit harder to find what is important rather than what isn’t. So it isn’t the best place to start. Think of it this way, in crossing out we were trying to find hay in a haystack. It’s pretty easy the stuff is everywhere. In blocking, we will be looking for the needle in the haystack instead and it is usually harder to do. After all, if we could already determine what was important we wouldn’t have any issues understanding what the authors are trying to tell us.

Hopefully, crossing out has helped you form a solid idea of what isn’t important so when you read certain parts of a sentence you don’t get caught up in the details. Also, I hope that by eliminating the fluff you are also getting a better sense of what is and isn’t important. After all, the whole point of crossing out was to build our reading comprehension skills.

How To Block

In blocking we will be focusing on what is important so we should have a systematic way of understanding this. Let’s look at a simple sentence to understand what to look out for as we read.

The dog ran across the field chasing a rabbit.

In this straightforward sentence, we are describing something. That something is a dog and they are the main character in our sentence.

What did the dog do? They ran.
Where? Across a field.
Why? To chase a rabbit.

While it seems redundant to ask so many questions about such a simple sentence it is important to understand that most complicated sentences follow the same script. They have a main character, usually an idea rather than a physical object or entity, that is described, but not always. Therefore we can ask the same simple questions (how, where, why, what, etc. ) about ideas in our complicated sentences too.

Worked Example: Back to Zombies

Let’s look at the same example we used when learning how to cross out to see how we can block. First, I will begin by defining the main character in each sentence. Then I will focus on asking and answering questions about this character. I typically focus on what, why, and how questions first since they get at the heart of the argument. Where and who questions tend to focus on details. It doesn’t mean they aren’t worth asking just secondary in importance.

Now onto the passage…

“The modern incarnation of the zombie, as seen strewn across pop culture horror novels and films in ever-increasing numbers, is easily recognized and radically different from its historical roots; any member of our modern Western culture can spot the gray, often rotting flesh, the black eyes, the dishevelled appearance, the shuffling gait, the wretched moaning, and, of course, the bloody mouths flecked with fresh flesh and detritus.”

Main Character: Modern zombie
What is the modern zombie? Easily recognized, different from its roots
Where is the modern zombie? Strewn across pop culture horror novels and films

I could run through all of the question words and try and answer each. In most cases you won’t be able to. Instead always ask a what, why, or how question and if you can answer one those move on.

Let’s look at the next sentence to understand how follow up questions can help us gain better understanding as well.

However, the zombie goes beyond cheap thrills; zombies, as well as other variations of horror monsters, represent a fear that pervades society as a whole, a collective nervousness of destruction at the hands of a seemingly invulnerable foe.

Main Character: Zombie
What is the zombie? A representation of fear

We could continue to ask questions about the zombie, however, a new idea was introduced. Here it is fear. Due to this, we should look into this idea more and ask follow-up questions about fear. We jump back to what, why, and how questions for this as shown below.

Fear about what? Destruction

Convert to Highlights (For Now…)

Why Are We Going to These Lengths?

It is tedious to block and simplify to understand a couple of sentences so why bother doing it? We are doing this for a couple of reasons. First to improve our comprehension skills so we can gain better insight into how sentences are constructed. The goal is to make reading comprehension effortless we do this by breaking it down into the small necessary steps you have to take and practicing them until they are easy.

Once these steps are easy we can put them all together to read without having to think about it. It is a bit like learning how to ride a bike. We need to learn how to balance, how to pedal, how to change gears, how to brake, etc. It is a ton at once, but it can be made much easier by breaking it out into little manageable pieces, which is why we have training wheels. Once we learn though we can jump on our bike and ride without thinking about it.

Second, we can use this technique on the really challenging sentences that we might find on our exams. Instead of rereading the same sentence multiple times we can shift our thought process and break the sentence down into parts to understand it. Often this is faster and more effective than rereading the same sentence multiple times.

Translation