Strengthen Questions: Find the MISSING Piece

By EMPOWERea on November 11, 2025

Here's a mistake I watch people make every single week. They read a Critical Reasoning argument once, fast, and dive straight into the answer choices. By choice (C) they have two that 'sound good.' By (E) they have three. So they reread the argument, reread the choices, and pick the one that sounds the most positive. I'll bet that habit has cost you MORE than a couple of minutes on your last practice set. And I'll bet you still got some of those questions wrong.

Here's the verdict: you're reading the choices too early. Strengthen questions are not 'hard.' They get EASY once you find the hole in the argument BEFORE you look at a single answer.

What a Strengthen question actually asks

Critical Reasoning (CR) is one of the three question types packed into the Verbal section, along with Sentence Correction and Reading Comprehension. If you've never thought of them as separate skills, read why Verbal is three tests hiding in one section.

A CR question gives you a short argument, then asks you something about it. A Strengthen question asks some version of: "Which of the following, if true, most strengthens the argument?" Your job is to find the choice that makes the conclusion MORE likely to be true. Not proven. Just more likely.

Three words you need:

Conclusion: the thing the author wants you to believe.
Evidence: the facts the author gives you to get you there.
Gap: the thing the author needs to be true but never says. It's the hole between the evidence and the conclusion.

Every Strengthen argument has a gap. The right answer fills it. That's the whole game.

The argument is a bridge with a plank missing

A wooden footbridge over a river with one plank missing in the middle, and a hand holding a single plank that fits the hole exactly. — The right answer is the plank that fits the hole.

Stop reading for a second and think about this. What's MORE useful: reading five choices and hoping one jumps out at you, or walking into the choices already knowing the exact shape of the plank you need?

When you know the shape, four of the five choices are obviously the wrong shape. You're not weighing them. You're tossing them.

The three step hunt

Find the conclusion. Write it down in a few words. Not a sentence. A few words.
Find the evidence. Write that down too, just as short.
Name the gap. Look at your two notes side by side. Find the idea that shows up in the conclusion but NOT in the evidence. That jump is where the hole is. Now ask: what would have to be true for this evidence to lead to this conclusion? Write your answer in ten words or fewer.

Only THEN do you read the choices. And you read them like a hunter, looking for one thing: the plank that fills your gap.

Try it

Six months ago, a regional coffee chain added a mobile ordering app at its downtown stores. The app lets customers order and pay before they arrive. Since then, the average customer wait time at those stores has dropped by about a third. The chain made no other changes at those stores during that time. The operations director concludes that adding the app at the chain's suburban stores will also cut wait times there.

Which of the following, if true, most strengthens the director's conclusion?

Many downtown customers who use the app say they would recommend it to a friend.
The suburban stores have larger parking lots than the downtown stores do.
At the suburban stores, most of a customer's wait is spent in line to order and pay, just as it was at the downtown stores before the app.
The chain plans to hire more baristas at its suburban stores next year.
Building the app cost the chain less than it had expected.

Show the answer

Step 1, conclusion. My note: "App in suburbs = shorter waits."

Step 2, evidence. My note: "App downtown = waits down a third. Nothing else changed. App skips the order and pay step."

Step 3, gap. What's in the conclusion that isn't in the evidence? The SUBURBS. Every fact is about downtown. Notice the author already closed one hole for you: "no other changes" means the app really did cause the downtown drop. So the only jump left is downtown to suburbs. The app works by cutting the ordering line. That only helps the suburbs if the ordering line is what's slowing people down there. My prediction: "Suburban waits come from the same ordering line."

Now the choices.

(A) Fans downtown. Says nothing about the suburbs and nothing about wait time. Wrong shape. Out.

(B) Parking lots. Has nothing to do with how long you wait for coffee once you're inside. Out.

(C) Suburban waits are mostly the ordering line, same as downtown was. That's my prediction almost word for word. If suburban waits were mostly about drinks being made, the app would do nothing. This choice rules that out. Keep it.

(D) More baristas. This might cut waits, but because of the BARISTAS, not the app. The conclusion is about what the app will do. Out.

(E) The app was cheap to build. Cost isn't wait time. Out.

The answer is (C).

The trap: most people who miss this pick (A) or (D). (A) sounds positive about the app. (D) sounds positive about shorter waits. But positive is not the same as CONNECTED. Neither one touches the downtown to suburbs jump. If you named the gap first, you never even get tempted.

The mistakes I see every week

Reading the choices before you know what you're looking for. Five well written choices will pull you in five directions. INSTEAD: write your gap in ten words or fewer before your eyes ever drop to (A).
Picking the choice that 'sounds good.' Test writers build wrong answers that feel friendly to the conclusion. INSTEAD: for every choice, ask one question: does this touch the jump I found? If it's about a different topic, a different group or a different cause, it's out.
Hunting for a choice that PROVES the conclusion. You won't find one, and you'll throw out the right answer because it seems too weak. INSTEAD: ask "does this make the conclusion MORE likely?" A small push in the right direction is all a Strengthen answer needs.
Ignoring the holes the author already closed. In the example, "no other changes" took one gap off the table. People still go looking for it. INSTEAD: when the argument plugs a hole for you, cross it off and focus on what's left.
Doing it all in your head. "I'm smart enough to just see it." THAT is pride talking, and pride is how you end up rereading the argument three times. INSTEAD: conclusion, evidence, gap. Three short notes. Every question. In practice AND on test day.

Why this matters so much on the Executive Assessment

The Verbal section gives you 14 questions in 30 minutes, a mix of Sentence Correction, Critical Reasoning and Reading Comprehension. That's a little over two minutes per question on average. Some questions deserve less. Reading Comprehension passages usually deserve more. Every minute you waste weighing five CR choices is a minute you steal from a passage later.

And Verbal is not the 'side' section. Each of the three sections is scored from 0 to 20, the total runs from 100 to 200, and all three count the same. You can see the full breakdown on GMAC's assessment structure page. The test is also adaptive section by section, so how you handle Verbal shapes the Verbal you get. You cannot treat a third of your score as an afterthought.

Here's the good news. Pacing problems on CR are almost never a speed problem. They're a method problem. People who predict the gap don't read faster. They just stop rereading. And if your Verbal time is bleeding out somewhere else, it's often Sentence Correction, where errors like parallelism and misplaced modifiers eat time when you don't have a system for spotting them.

The jump is usually hiding in plain sight

Say you read an argument that goes: "Employees who took our leadership course got promoted faster, so the course makes people better leaders." Before you read on, find the jump. Go.

Did you catch it? The evidence is about PROMOTIONS. The conclusion is about being a better LEADER. Those aren't the same thing. Maybe the people who signed up were already the ambitious ones. A strengthener would connect the two: say, that the course was assigned at random, or that promotions there are based on leadership reviews. You found that in seconds, and you didn't need a single answer choice to do it.

That's the skill. Look for the word or idea that appears in the conclusion and nowhere in the evidence. It's almost always the hole.

Your challenge for today

Pull five Strengthen questions you've already done. Cover the answer choices with your hand or a sheet of paper. For each one, write the conclusion, the evidence and the gap, ten words or fewer for the gap. Then uncover the choices and check your prediction against the right answer.

For every prediction that missed, you are NOT allowed to shrug and say "I don't know why." Look at your notes and find the exact moment you went wrong. Did you grab the wrong conclusion? Miss the jump? Pick a gap the author had already closed? Name it, then redo the question. Do that tonight, and the next Strengthen question you see will look very different.

Sources

GMAC: Executive Assessment structure, sections and scoring