gre reading comprehension

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:

Continue reading →

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  • no Antonyms and Analogy questions – these have been replaced by more Reading Comprehension passages.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?

Continue reading →