Gre verbal section 2 pot

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and Spelling Success in 20 Minutes a Day, which makes it easy to boost your vocabulary and your Verbal

section score.

Try these strategies to help build your vocabulary for the GRE:

1. Practice determining the meaning of unfamiliar words in context.

2. Maintain your own vocabulary list and review it regularly.

3. Study prefixes, suffixes, and word roots. Many GRE-level words have Latin or Greek word roots. Knowing

these word bases and common beginnings and endings can give you an edge in determining the mean￾ing of unfamiliar words.

Think It Through

At least as important as the size of your vocabulary, however, is your ability to use words as logical tools. In

other words, the GRE assesses your ability to think clearly and logically.

As you have progressed through school, you have moved from memorizing facts to researching and

organizing them to interpreting and expanding them. In graduate school, you will be required both to evaluate

others’ ideas and arguments and to generate your own. Authors often present ideas in an artful fashion—per￾haps to disguise their arguments’ weaknesses. You will need to lift the curtains of artifice and peer

through to the essence of the arguments.

The GRE’s Verbal section, therefore, is designed to assess your skill with words. Whether you are com￾paring concepts (analogies), contrasting concepts (antonyms), deducing meaning from available clues (sen￾tence completion questions), or interpreting and extending meanings (reading comprehension questions),

you are being asked to use words as logical tools.

Fortunately, there are guidelines for these skill sets. This chapter lays out those guidelines for you. You

will learn attack strategies for each of the four types of questions, as well as techniques for questions that seem

to resist analysis. With practice, these techniques and strategies will become second nature and will remain

in your repertoire of logical tools as you enter graduate school.

How to Approach Analogies

An analogy question asks you to find the relationship between a pair of words. Words, of course, represent

concrete or abstract things; so you are being asked to discover relationships between things. Once you understand

the relationship between the initial pair of words, you must find the answer pair with an analogous (the same

kind of) relationship.

Tip

When working on your vocabulary, remember to focus first on roots, prefixes, and suffixes. You will be pleas￾antly surprised to see how quickly learning these will increase the size of your vocabulary!