The Big Picture In last week’s post, we discussed three key elements of success on GRE Quant. To recap, there are many worthwhile and effective strategies and approaches to Quant problems, but there are principles that undergird a great deal of success on Quant. The principles discussed comprised three different ways to approach Quant problems […]
Power Vocabulary Webinar Preview
Res, non verba Tonight at 8:00 pm Eastern, we continue our free GRE Webinar series with a discussion of the importance of vocabulary on the GRE and how to master both the content and approach necessary to ace GRE Verbal. Just as some students view math on GRE Quant as an insurmountable edifice of facts and formulas, […]
Vocab Journaling: Let’s do it!
In my last post I discussed the importance of vocabulary, not as an exercise to be done in isolation but instead as a habitual tool for learning and reinforcing unknown or unfamiliar words you come across. As I noted, this skill translates not only into improvements on Sentence Completion and Equivalence problems but also on Reading Comprehension, […]
GRE Vocabulary: The Sage Continues…
THE NEVERENDING STORY: There were some pretty strange children’s movies when I was a kid. Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth, the so-bad-it’s-good Ron Howard movie Willow (featuring Real Genius and Top Gun star Val Kilmer), and the still-disturbing leporine epic Watership Down. But insofar as capturing the imagination of the archetypical misunderstood eight-year-old (imagine the eighties version of Harry Potter), nothing surpassed The Neverending Story, […]
GRE Text Completion Challenge: Follow the Clues
GRE Text Completion gives you a sizable chunk of text to parse when you have multiple blanks to fill. Putting all the context clues together can be tricky, and any hard vocabulary that pops up, whether in the text or the answer choices, won’t make your work any easier. Get some practice with this challenging three-blank […]
Sentence Equivalence Challenge: Work Around Unknown Words
GRE Sentence Equivalence has a knack for finding the limits of your vocabulary. Fortunately, the GRE isn’t a vocabulary test. You don’t have to know every word in a question to know the answer. Sometimes filling in the blank is a matter of relying on easier words and eliminating answer choices. To see what I mean, try […]
Doing GRE Reading Comprehension Exercises to Prepare for the Argument Essay
In the Analytical Writing section’s “Analyze an Argument” task, you’ll critique a short argument that’s being made for or against some prediction (“profits will rise”), explanation (“genetics is the cause”), recommendation (“repeal the ban”), or other topic of debate. Your directions may be to ferret out hidden assumptions or to identify evidence that could help […]
Reading Comprehension Challenge: Deconstruct the Argument
Argument passages in GRE Reading Comp vary in complexity. If you’re asked to weaken or strengthen an argument, then the passage probably contains just one conclusion. But if you’re asked to identify the roles that parts of the passage play in an argument, then the text may include a main conclusion and an intermediate conclusion. […]
Real-world prep for the GRE Reading Comprehension and the Argument Essay
A sizable chunk of the GRE requires you to think about arguments. Half of Analytical Writing is the Analyze an Argument task, and about half of Verbal Reasoning is Reading Comprehension, a question type that often uses argument-based passages. Conveniently, you can prepare for Reading Comp and the Argument Task simultaneously using free (and modestly […]
Reading Comprehension Challenge: Strengthen the Argument
GRE Reading Comp passages usually try to persuade you of something. An argument is given, and your job is to analyze it. Some of the hardest Verbal questions require you to identify information that would strengthen an argument. For practice, try this Reading Comp question that likely just 2 in 10 test takers would get right.