The two most frequent questions students have about the GRE are: “What math do I need to study,” and “What vocab do I need to know?” If you’re here, you’re likely trying to find answers to the second question. So, how does the GRE test your vocabulary? Let’s talk about it. GRE Vocabulary Having a […]
10 Ways to Effectively Study Vocab Words
Before we get started on our list of 10 effective ways of studying vocab words, you’ll need to get your words together! If you don’t already have a list prepared or given to you, you can hop over to our GRE Free Help Area and grab our Repeat Offenders List! This contains the GRE’s top 700 […]
Holiday Vocabulary and the GRE
Happy Holidays! PowerScore will be closed on December 25, but we know that for some of you, GRE prep never stops. Check out twenty commonly-occurring vocabulary words used in sentences about our favorite holiday classics. In Eight Crazy Nights, Davey Stone spends most of the movie obstreperously objecting to the austere judge’s sentencing—he even defies […]
Power Studying: The Podcast Method with Nevin Varghese
My name is Nevin Varghese and I have been tutor for about 5 years now. I initially started out as an SAT tutor and then more recently transitioned to teaching the GRE. PowerScore gave me an opportunity to not only teach one-on-one lessons, but to continue to develop my teaching in larger classroom groups. I […]
Sentence Equivalence and Secondary Definitions
A Rose by Any Other Name Attempt the question; then read the explanation below. A GRE Favorite Is this answer choice “appropriate?” What if we “appropriated” it? Where did you “obtain” those ideas? Do those ideas still “obtain?” The “wag” sang a “rag” just as my energy began to “flag.” hom·o·nym noun each of two […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]