Knowing your vocabulary can make a huge difference on Sentence Equivalence. Imagine knowing the answer to a sentence completion without even reading the sentence. Sounds like something only a verbal Houdini could pull off. Well, you don’t need to be a GRE magician to pull off such an astonishing act. Welcome to Sentence Equivalence. That’s [...]
The Top Five Most Commonly Confused GRE Words
Many of the words you’ll seen on the GRE are confusing, and, in fact, are often intended to be so. Therefore, one of the best ways to boost your final GRE score is to learn as many vocab words as possible before test day. Below are five of the most commonly confused words found on [...]
GRE Big Book: Blast from the Past
About 10-years ago, I had a huge tome at home (pardon the horrible rhyme.) The book contained 27 real GRE tests, providing ample practice that paid off test-day. This massive volume was known as the Big Book. As of 15 years ago, it was no longer sold in bookstores, so I’d procured my copy off [...]
So What Exactly is a Text Completion? (And who’s that Russian author?)
SIMILAR BUT DIFFERENT For a text completion, you are asked to fill in anywhere from one to three blanks. The number of blanks will be immediately apparent from the question. The twist here is that if the sentence has two or three blanks you will be given three answer choices for each blank. In order [...]
Text Completion vs. Sentence Equivalence
Soon the simple sentence completion of today will be a relic of the past. We may even look back fondly on it when we grapple with what’s in store on the revised GRE: five sentence paragraphs with three blanks, dual blankers where randomly guessing correctly is a 1 in 9 shot, and a single blank [...]
Caution: Circumspect vs Circumscribe
If something is circumscribed it is limited. Say everyday I walk the same way to work, go to the same restaurants and eat the same food. My life would be pretty circumscribed. Circumscribe can also be used more literally, as in to draw a line around. Dave picked up a city map and circumscribed a [...]
FAQ – Will the Revised GRE Verbal be Easier?
Judging from the GRE practice questions provided by ETS, I have not seen any 700+ level words. That said, the sections are adaptive so we could very likely be seeing the easier sections, or at least not the hardest of the hard. Waiting for the top test takers August 1st could very well be words [...]
Think You Can Handle GRE Combinations and Permutations?
Over the years, as the math section has become more difficult, permutations and combinations are popping up more often. At the same time, students are also becoming more adept at handling these kinds of problems (I’d hypothesize that more practice problems are available.) As a result, permutations and combinations problems are not only more common [...]
The Revised GRE– What’s New on the Math Front?
Concept-wise, I would say the math section is business as usual, save for two things: coordinate geometry and the quadratic equation. While parabolas are tested on the current GRE, they are oddball questions, geometry outliers in the usually slew of right triangle and circle problems. In the revised GRE book, an entire section is devoted [...]
FAQ: How do I improve on the Reading Comprehension?
Typically when I have a student who is struggling with the reading comprehension I have them do a little exercise. I give them two minutes to read an entire passage (yes, you should always read the passage first before attempting the questions.) After this time, I have them immediately close the book and have them [...]
