Gre verbal section 1 pdf

Introduction to the Verbal Section

The Verbal section of the GRE presents you with questions very much like those on the preceding sample test.

As you can see from the pretest, a good vocabulary will help you immensely. In addition, numerous strategies

can help you maximize your chances of correctly answering the questions, which this chapter will discuss.

The Verbal section of the GRE is timed for 30 minutes. In that time, you will be presented with 30 ques￾tions, each with answer choices a—e. Because the exam is a computer-adaptive test (CAT), every test taker will

receive a different set of questions. If you answer a given question correctly, you will then be presented with

a more difficult question. If you answer incorrectly, you will receive a less difficult question. The harder the

questions you successfully answer, the more points you receive. That means your answers to the first 10 or

15 questions are particularly important, because the CAT program is finding the general range within which

you correctly answer questions. Once the program has determined your general score range (e.g., the 500s,

the 600s, the 700s), it uses the remaining questions to fine-tune your score (e.g., 620, 640, 660). That means

you want to be especially careful with your answers on the first half of the Verbal section.

Remember that you may also have an additional section (which could be presented as a Verbal or a Quan￾titative section). If so, one of the two Verbal (or Quantitative) sections will be a research section that will not

count toward your score. However, you will not be able to tell which of the two similar sections is the scored sec￾tion and which is the research section. It is important to treat each one as though it were the scored section.

What to Expect on the GRE Verbal Section

As you saw in the pretest, there are four kinds of Verbal section questions: analogies, antonyms, sentence

completions, and reading comprehension questions. These questions are designed to test your compre￾hension of the logical relationships between words, as well as your ability to understand and think critically

about complex written material.

Analogies test your vocabulary and your ability to identify relationships between pairs of words (and the

concepts they represent). In each analogy question, you will be presented with a pair of words in all capital

letters, in a format that looks like this:

PAGE : BOOK

Then you will be given five answer choices, a—e, in the same format but in lowercase letters. You must choose

the answer choice that contains words with the same relationship to each other as the initial pair has. Straight￾forward techniques can help you divine the relationships, and they are easily mastered with practice. You will

become familiar with these techniques later in this book.

The relationship of all antonyms is one of opposition. You want to pick the answer choice (i.e., the word

or concept) that is most nearly the opposite of the question word. The question word will be presented in all

capital letters, for example, FLOOD. The answer choices will consist of either single words or phrases, lettered

a—e, and you must select the word or phrase that is most nearly opposite in meaning to the initial word.

–THE GRE VERBAL SECTION–

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