The Goldilocks Passage Several weeks ago we analyzed the contents of the new PowerPrep Plus practice tests, their composition, question types, concepts tested, etc. This week, I’d like to focus on the Reading Comprehension portion of GRE Verbal, specifically, what kinds of questions to expect and how to shift your approach depending on whether you […]
Master this Challenge to Succeed on GRE Verbal
Long Passage GRE Reading Comp Deconstructed Did you try the long passage challenge set? Ready for some explanations? Read on for a complete breakdown of how to tear through a difficult passage like this (note: images of the entire passage set are also appended at the end of this post for reference). Question 9 This […]
Verbal Challenge: Another Text Completion
More Problems, Please! One frequent student complaint about GRE preparation is the lack of available, current material to work with. Yes, there are big books of “GRE” problems, except that they’re not; they are problems developed by third parties to approximate GRE questions. Available, current ETS material is as follows: Practice Book for the PBT […]
Verbal Challenge: Text Completion
Beyond Vocabulary: Prelude to Difficult Text Completion You’ve mastered GRE vocabulary, done the flashcards, unlocked all the achievements on the apps, irritated your friends, won the Scripps spelling bee and are still wondering what mountains are left to climb to master GRE Verbal. We have some good news and some bad news. The good news […]
Quantitative Challenge: Circle Inscribed in a Right Triangle
Where’s the Radius? Occasionally on GRE Quant, we might encounter a geometry problem that confounds easy analysis. Our usual techniques of drawing our own image and labeling values might not seem to produce any useful information, and we end up feeling “stuck.” As we’ve discussed previously, one key to success on GRE Quant is to […]
Key Steps to Success on GRE Verbal
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 […]
Quantitative: Mind-Melting Arithmetic
Calculator Malfunction! The GRE lets you use a calculator. Hooray! But wait, there’s a catch. You can’t bring your own calculator. No, you’re stuck with the equivalent of a 1987 Windows 2.0 on-screen calculator. Worse still, ETS sometimes seems to go out of its way to make sure that you can’t solve the problems using […]
Quantitative: Simple and Compound Interest
How to Prepare for Less Common Quant Topics: With limited time and a lot to cover, a difficult choice many GRE students face is how much time to devote to the “errata” of the GRE Quant section. Among the more difficult problems, the GRE may throw students a curve ball: perhaps a difficult probability question, […]
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, […]