Try these GRE Sentence Equivalence practice questions from the 5lb. Book of GRE Practice Problems to test your Sentence Equivalence skills. These five problems start simple, but the last few are as complex as anything you’ll see in an official GRE Sentence Equivalence problem. Read more

The GRE Verbal section is about more than just vocabulary and memorization. GRE Verbal also isn’t a bunch of subjective questions with no real right answer. Instead, it’s a challenging—and interesting—test of your reading, attention, English knowledge, and executive reasoning skills. Read more

There are two types of fill-in-the-blank vocabulary questions on the GRE: Text Completion and Sentence Equivalence. Text Completion questions ask you to fill in one, two, or three blanks with a single word; Sentence Equivalence questions ask you to fill in one blank with two words. Often, students think of these as the “synonym” questions, but that’s not entirely accurate; being too focused on looking for exact synonyms trips up some test takers. Others aren’t rigorous enough when looking for a pair. In this article, I’m going to discuss exactly what we’re looking for when we “pair” answers for Sentence Equivalence and what common traps we should avoid. Read more

In this article, GRE instructor Tom Anderson asks a smart question: is it better to sort of know a lot of GRE words, or to really know a few GRE words? It turns out that you’re better off if you learn fewer words, but really learn them well. If you don’t, here’s one way the GRE could trick you. Read more

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I’m going to give you two options. Which do you think would be more beneficial for your GRE Verbal score? Read more

You can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GRE courses absolutely free. Crazy, right? Check out our upcoming courses here.

GRE Verbal is Not a Rorschach Test

What do you see in the image above? A butterfly? A twisty rollercoaster? Your mother’s disapproval? Read more

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Let’s take a look at some of the most useful GRE vocabulary words. These words don’t look that important on their own, but they can reverse the meaning of an entire phrase or sentence! Get started by trying out this GRE Text Completion question: Read more

You can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GRE courses absolutely free. Crazy, right? Check out our upcoming courses here.

Why am I thinking about an old spiritual guru, sitting on top of a mountain, eating steaks? It’s because I’m trying to remember the word rarefied. Sure, there are more mundane ways to remember this word, but I have my reasons. Namely, I’m trying to tie several meanings of “rarefied” into a single mnemonic sentence. Read more

You can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GRE courses absolutely free. Crazy, right? Check out our upcoming courses here.

There are four reasons to miss a GRE Sentence Equivalence problem. Here are three of them:

• You misread the sentence.
• You didn’t know all of the vocabulary words (or remembered a word incorrectly).
• You were short on time and the problem looked tough, so you guessed and got unlucky.

These are all things that you can address with practice. (Check out our Text Completion & Sentence Equivalence Strategy Guide for ideas!) However, we won’t be talking about them here. Instead, let’s look at a fourth reason to miss a GRE Sentence Equivalence problem:

• You fell for a trap.

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A lot of people think that GRE Verbal questions can have more than one right answer. The GRE itself doesn’t do anything to dispel this myth, since Verbal questions often include wording like which of the following is best supported? or with which statement would the author most likely agree?. These questions make it sound as if you’re supposed to read five pretty good answers and pick the best one, even if the other ones are okay, too. However, this mindset will hurt you on test day. Read more