Dealing with Details: Repetition - MCAT

Nutmeg has good advice about understanding WHY details are there, not understanding every little bit.

As far as recognizing what is skippable, there are some typical structures that give you that hint. For example: "Sandra Day O’Connor was a paragon, an example to women everywhere, a perfect choice as the first female justice." (I just made that up.) In that sentence, and pretty much any sentence with that structure, the three things set off by commas are all similar to each other. If you don’t know what "paragon" means, that’s OK - you know, based on the structure, that it has to be something similar to the other two. And you don’t need to read them all carefully, just remember that this is stuff about why O’Connor is awesome.

There’s a similar structure, like this: "Condoleezza Rice is a classically trained pianist, a figure skater, and a football fan." The "and" in there means that the details are NOT all the same thing, but they are three details that are somewhat related. In this case, it’s Rice’s hobbies. Still, you don’t need to memorize them or even necessarily understand them all (my examples are obvious, but there could be one with words you don’t know), just note what they’re about in general.

Also, anything with numbers is a detail. Don’t worry about memorizing or understanding them, just note where they are and what they’re about.

Another hint: repetition usually hints that there are several examples or statements about the same thing. For example, this quote from the VR example on aamc.org (http://www.aamc.org/students/mcat/vrsampleitems.pdf):

"It is important to see that we don’t just talk about
arguments in terms of war. We can actually win or
lose arguments. We see the person we are arguing
with as an opponent. We attack his positions and we
defend our own. We gain and lose ground. We plan
and use strategies."

All those sentences that start with "We" are examples of how arguments are not just TALKED ABOUT in terms of war, but really experienced and structured in terms of war (which is what the author says in words in the rest of the paragraph). This is typical. When you get a list like this, you don’t need to necessarily understand every item, but understand what the list consists of, and why it’s there.