GMATPill Explanations:

1: Practice Reading Comprehension 6 Questions “Genetic Mutations”
2: Practice Reading Comprehension 6 Questions “Federal Efforts”
3: Practice Reading Comprehension Passage 8 Questions “Women’s Contribution to the Economy”

GMATPill’s Four Reading Comprehension Tips:

1. Pretend you’re REALLY engaged in the passage. REACT to emotions in the passage, focus on words that express the author’s opinion about the topic and internalize that perspective. After reading halfway through sentences, ask yourself WHY the author is feeling the way he/she is feeling

2. Focus on the first topical sentence of each paragraph and CONNECT THE DOTS to figure out what the story of the passage is. Don’t just skim, you need to DISSECT that sentence – on first read you’ll often miss the point. If you focus on that sentence, you almost don’t need to read the rest of the paragraph.

3. CUT THE FLUFF. In order to dissect that first sentence, you’re going to need to CUT THE FLUFF. That means, take out any extraneous adjectives that are great to know, but for the purpose of understanding the author’s point, it helps to skip over these words and focus on the key words in the sentence. Once you take enormously, extraneously, and excessively descriptive words out of a sentence, you can understand more clearly the author’s intention and purpose in writing.

4. Focus on key connecting phrases. After that first sentence that you dissect, you’ll need to focus on key connecting phrases as you skim from sentence to sentence. Often times, a simple glance at a transitive phrase can help you guess what the rest of the sentence is *probably* going to talk about, as well as what the rest of the paragraph is going to continue talking about. You know these future sentences are probably going to either support or refute, so figure out what direction is going and just focus on that. Don’t read into details. That’s for the losers.

Related Resources:

• GMAT Pill Table of Contents
• Reading Comprehension Cut the Fluff
• The Last Minute GMAT Pill Study Plan

B is correct.
Do you say
“demand that the money is controlled”
Or
“demand that the money be controlled”

You say “I want the house to be built by architects”—instead of “I want the house is built by architects.”

So you choose “demand that the money be controlled”—which is answer B.

But let’s pretend you didn’t know that so you keep reading the sentence.

You asked about “them” in “but it allows them”—it allows who? It allows “the administration.”

You also asked about “it” in “but it allows them”—but who/what allows them to spend?
Well, it’s the budget. You might think it seems too far apart because there’s a lot of FLUFF in the sentence.

Try reducing the sentence to:
“The budget for education reflects XYZ, but it [the budget] can only be spent on ABCDEF.”

Sounds pretty ridiculous! I don’t think I’d be able to take the GMAT while going through training or doing even a simulation in Iraq. But hey, this guy did–and he did it well!