Sentence Level

Each paragraph is composed of sentences. To understand a paragraph, you have to understand each sentence in the paragraph first. To understand each sentence, you must know

1.Five fundamental sentence structures

2.Substituting the nouns/adjectives/adverbs in the sentence by noun/adj/adv clauses

3 Simplifying the noun/adj/adv clauses

Most important, you have to know:

Recursive structure of the sentence

According to my experience, most of the sentences in the notorious GRE verbal section and in Time magazine become understandable after I learnt these concepts.