If you find yourself effortlessly hitting your target score when you take the practice tests, don’t just pat yourself on the back. Set a higher target score and start aiming for that one. The purpose of buying this book and studying for the test is to improve your score as much as possible, so be sure to push your limits.
General Hint 5: Know What You’re Being Asked
You can’t know the answer until you know the question. This might sound obvious, but many a point has been lost by the careless student who scans the answer choices hastily before properly understanding the question. Take the following example:
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Two positively charged particles, one twice as massive as the other, are moving in the same circular orbit in a magnetic field. Which law explains to us why the less massive particle moves at twice the speed of the more massive particle? |
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(A) |
Coulomb’s Law |
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(B) |
Conservation of angular momentum |
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(C) |
Hooke’s Law |
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(D) |
The ideal gas law |
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(E) |
Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle | |
The hasty student will notice that the question is about charged particles, and see “Coulomb’s Law” as the first answer choice. Without further ado, the student answers A and loses a quarter of a point.
A more careful student will not just read the question, but will take a moment to understand the question before glancing at the answer choices. This student will realize that the question ultimately deals with particles moving in circular orbits, and the relative speeds of these particles. Whether or not these particles are charged is irrelevant: you’re facing a problem of rotational motion, not of electric forces. Once you’ve recognized what you’re dealing with, you will have little trouble in correctly answering B.
General Hint 6: Know How to Guess
ETS doesn’t take off
1 /4 of a point for each wrong answer in order to punish you for guessing. They do it so as not to reward you for blind guessing. Suppose that, without looking at the questions at all, you just randomly entered responses in the first 20 spaces on your answer sheet. Because there’s a 20% chance of guessing correctly on any given question, odds are you would guess right for four questions and wrong for 16 questions. Your raw score for those 20 questions would then be:
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You would be no better off and no worse off than if you’d left those twenty spaces blank.
Now suppose in each of the first 20 questions you are able to eliminate just one possible answer choice, so that you guess with a 25% chance of being right. Odds are, you’d get five questions right and 15 questions wrong, giving you a raw score of:
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The lesson to be learned here is that blind guessing doesn’t help, but educated guessing does. If you can eliminate even one of the five possible answer choices, you should guess. We’ll discuss how to eliminate answer choices on certain special kinds of questions in Physics Hint 5: Eliminate Wrong Answers.
