GRE Verbal

An Easy Way to Learn GRE Test Words – Learn Them through Roots

Dilip Oak's Academy

Word RootsStarting this week, we are introducing a new feature that will help all you students who are struggling to prepare for the GRE test – posts that will help you learn the GRE test words using roots. Though the technical meaning of ‘roots’ is a little different, here it is useful to think of them as the original Latin and Greek words that the English words came from.

Learning words through their roots is useful in two ways – firstly, knowing the root and meaning of a word can help you understand why the word means what it means. Secondly, since there are often many words which come from the same Greek or Latin root, this helps you to learn several words at one time. It becomes easier because, as you will seen in today’s post, words from the same root look similar and also share a common set of meanings. The two lists below, which cover 32 words totally, will illustrate how this is so.

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An Easy Way to Learn GRE Words (Through Roots) Part 2

Dilip Oak's Academy

Word RootsIf you found the last post on roots helpful, here are 2 more roots which cover 25 GRE words. For those of you who have come directly to this post, here’s a link that will help you understand why we are talking about roots so much: go to first roots post. (But basically, it helps to make learning the GRE words much easier).

genus generis (14 words)

The Latin word genus (cognate with Greek ‘genos’ and the Sanskrit root ‘jan’) has produced a number of English words. Genus has two basic forms: ‘genus’ and ‘generis’ (the second of which is more important because most derived words in English and other modern European languages have come from it whereas ‘genus’ exists as a single English word).

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GRE Prep for Oak’s Students – Vocabulary Learning and Revision

Dilip Oak's Academy

Vocabulary Learning and Revision (to be started preferably 3-5 months in advance)

The largest, most time-consuming component of your GRE preparation is vocabulary revision. Achieving a good level of basic preparation involves getting familiar with around 4,000 words commonly used on GRE test. To really understand a word you need to know its range of meanings, some of its important secondary meanings, its usage (illustrated by sample sentences using the word) and it is often useful to know the roots of the word. Dilip Oak’s Academy has provided two very useful aids for learning and revising these various aspects. Described below is how you can use them both at home and outside.

 

At Home:

When at home use VaiVocabulary. VaiVocabulary is one of the best vocabulary learning softwares available in the market. It has a number of features which help to make vocabulary learning really effective. Here are some tips on how to get the most of it:

  • Try out all the features in order to select which combination works best for you – some of the more important features are given below:
    • Pictures – these are connected to the meaning and help to remind you of the meaning.
    • Sample sentences or usage – remember you don’t understand the meaning when you learn the definition: real understanding comes when you see how the word is used in sample sentences.
    • ‘Video’ – most of this is really audio, but the videos give really good explanations of word meaning and lots of additional sample sentences.
    • Mnemonics – ways of linking the meaning of the word with the form of the word; many are given; select the ones you find most useful.
    • Word origins – these are the roots of words which help you to understand the meanings of words rather than just learning them by heart.
    • Synonyms – the easy synonyms help you to understand the meaning of a word better; the hard ones extend your vocabulary.
  • Mark any word you cannot remember ‘very difficult’ by default so that you will be able to repeatedly revise it; lower the rating when you get better at remembering.
  • most important: sincerely go through all quizzes, the rapid revision (it comes up at the beginning of a new session) and the difficulty-based revision sessions.
  • The VaiVocabulary DVD has a tutorial that will take you through all the available features and explain how to use them
  • If you run into any problems with installing or using the DVD contact the Academy – all the problems can be fixed one way or another, but don’t let problems prevent you from the enormous benefits of using this great vocabulary learning software.

Outside (i.e. when you are not at home): Use FlashCards and FlashCard Companion

  • The FlashCards contain 4,000 GRE words and their meaning; 2-3 shades of meaning are given for every word.
  • The FlashCard Companions are booklets which give you a sample phrase for every meaning of every word in the FlashCards.
  • Every page in the FlashCard Companion booklet corresponds to a FlashCard. The number of the FlashCard is given at the top of the page. Word numbers are also given for ease of reference.

GRE Prep – Preliminary Reading

Dilip Oak's Academy

One of the most important aspects of preparing for reading comprehension in the GRE is preliminary reading – that is, reading to be done before you start tackling GRE RC passages in order to prepare you for the challenges that those passages will throw up.

One challenge that you will face on Reading Comprehension passages is that they tend to be about unfamiliar topics and concepts; and talk about unfamiliar terms and fields. They use difficult phrasing and vocabulary, and complicated sentence structure. The only way to get used to the level of complexity you will find in GRE passages is to read widely.

Another challenge is the fact that reading passages on screen means that you may not be able to see the whole passage at a time, and may have to scroll up and down to read the rest of the passage. This is very different from reading on paper, where you can usually see the whole passage on screen at a glance. The fact that, when reading longer passages onscreen, you will not be able to see the whole of the passage at once makes comprehending the passage much more difficult.

Reading widely both on paper and onscreen will help you build up the skills that you need to meet the challenges presented by reading comprehension passages in the GRE. The reading material suggested here is arranged, and should be read, in the following order:

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GRE Prep for Oak’s Students: Reading Comprehension Practice in the Last 2 Months

Dilip Oak's Academy

Practice for Reading Comprehension on the GRE

Once you have completed your preliminary reading, you should have gained several benefits:

  • exposure to fields outside your normal reading
  • knowledge of terms and concepts; personalities, processes, phenomena; and in general ideas and things in those unfamiliar fields
  • an ability to handle complex sentence structure and phrasing
  • an ability to understand the structure of passages and the modes of reasoning used and to understand the author’s main point.

Once you have attained some level of comfort on these fronts, you are ready to tackle the GRE reading comprehension passages in the practice material. The order in which you will do this final material is as follows.

  • Medium-level GRE Reading Comprehension
  • Hard GRE Reading Comprehension
  • ETS Material

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GRE Test Prep: Reading Comprehension and Discrete Questions: Challenges & Tips

Dilip Oak's Academy2 Comments

So, you are preparing for the GRE test. You know that the Verbal section is going to be demanding. What are the big challenges in the Verbal section of the Revised General GRE?

Challenge #1: Reading Comprehension Passages

Screenshot of a Reading Comprehension question in the Revised General GRE
Reading Comprehension Question

First, a bit of good bit of news: the Reading Comprehension passages on the Revised GRE test are short. A Verbal section generally contains 5 Reading Comprehension passages, most which are 20-25 lines long; and one of them may be as short as 3-5 lines. The longest passages are of about 40 lines or so. (See ETS’s introduction to reading comprehension, sample questions and tips)

But Reading Comprehension is never very easy. Firstly, the passages cover a wide variety of topics, most of which are very unfamiliar. Here are some topics that have appeared in the past:

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The Challenges in the Verbal Section of the Revised GRE Test (Hint: It has Gotten Tougher)

Dilip Oak's Academy

Verbal ReasoningWhen the Revised General GRE test was launched (way back on 1 August 2011), a whole host of changes was introduced. One consequence was a revamped Verbal Reasoning part in which there are now:

  • two Verbal sections in the test with a total of 40 questions, instead of one section with a total of 30 questions
  • no Antonyms and Analogy questions – these have been replaced by more Reading Comprehension passages.
  • Text Completion questions (which require you to fill up to 3 blanks in a passage which can contain up to five sentences) and
  • Sentence Equivalence questions (which require you to select two correct synonyms to fill in the blank in the sentence out of the 6 options given)
  • Sentence Completion questions with single- and double-blanks
    .

To sum up, Reading Comprehension is now more important, the Sentence Completion type questions got a little harder to get right and Vocabulary is more or less just as important as it was earlier – so, you still have to learn that GRE word list!). As a result of those two changes, students also find the Verbal section harder to complete on time. So, how do you handle that difficulty?

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