The 5 lb. Book: How to Study Text Completions
We’ve very excited because our latest book, the 5 lb Book of GRE Practice Problems, is about to hit shelves! The book contains more than 1,100 pages of practice problems (and solutions), so you can drill on anything and everything that might be giving you trouble.
Let’s try out one of the problems! This Text Completion (TC) problem has just one blank, so give yourself approximately 45 seconds to get to your answer. Afterwards, we’ll solve the problem and also discuss how to approach TC questions in general.
After many years of war and bloodshed, some become ____________ suffering, casting a blind eye to scenes of misery around them.
inured to exempted from dominant over effusive towards maudlin over © ManhattanPrep, 2013
There are several important steps that help us to answer TC questions both effectively and efficiently.
(1) Read only the sentence
Read all the way to the period, but do NOT then jump to the answer choices. Instead
(2) While reading, look for the Target, Clues, and any Pivots
The Target: The blank is talking about something; what is that thing? Is it a particular person or other noun in the sentence? Is it an action?
Clues: At least one clue will be present to tell us what kind of meaning the answer choice must have
Pivots: Does the sentence change direction at any point? Do the clues point in the same direction as the blank, or should the blank go in the opposite direction?
In our sample question, the blank is talking about a characteristic of some people mentioned in the sentence “ these people become something. This is our target.
There are two clues that help us get at the desired meaning. First, something happens after many years of war and bloodshed “ that is, these experiences somehow change people. How? Some people start to cast a blind eye to scenes of misery around them.
Are there any pivots? Both of these modifiers are connected to the main part of the sentence by commas, but there are no contrast words that might indicate a change of direction. In other words, the meaning in the blank agrees with the clue. Further, remember that the blank happens because people experience a lot of war and bloodshed “ that is, there is a cause-effect relationship.
(3) Write your own Fill-In, then find a match in the answers
This is a crucial step; do not skip it. Figure out what kind of meaning you think the blank should reflect before you look at the answer choices. Then, when you look at the answer choices, ask yourself does this word match the meaning of what I decided should go in the blank?
Why is that so important? Let’s say that I tell you I want a word that means really happy. Then I show you a list of 5 words. Here they are:
morose apoplectic ecstatic garrulous zealous
Which of these questions is easier to answer:
(1) What does each word mean?
(2) Which word means really happy?
You do not care what each word means. You only care about finding the one word that means really happy. You can look at a word and think this doesn’t mean happy much more quickly than you can articulate the specific definition of that word.
Don’t make your life harder: figure out what you think the blank means before you look at the answers. In our original problem at top, we might think something like, Well, if you see a lot of terrible things and that causes you to be sort of blind to the suffering of others, then maybe it’s something like ˜people become used to suffering or ˜people become so used to suffering that they don’t notice it anymore.
Notice that we didn’t come up with one single word to put in the blank. That’s fine “ you don’t need a real vocab word. You just have to get the meaning straight in your own mind, using whatever words make the most sense to you.
Write your fill-in down. Okay, now we can look at those answers!
inured to exempted from dominant over effusive towards maudlin over
Which of these answers means to get so used to something that you don’t really notice it anymore?
If you picked the first answer, inured to, then you are absolutely correct. Inured has the meaning that we articulated above.
What about the other four answers? While the clock is ticking, it’s enough to know that the word doesn’t mean what you want it to mean. After we’re done with that set of problems or that test, though, we should go back and make sure that we feel comfortable with all of the vocabulary that shows up anywhere in the problem.
If someone becomes exempted from something, that means he or she is no longer required to do something or can skip something. To become dominant over might signify to conquer or to dominate something or someone. Effusive denotes someone who is doing something to excess or having an over the top reaction Finally, a maudlin person is sad or weepy and overemotional. Note the trap in this last answer. A test-taker might easily think that after many years of war and bloodshed, someone could become sad or overemotional, but the meaning at the end of the sentence contradicts that interpretation; the sentence describes people who stop noticing the misery.
It’s possible that we won’t be able to articulate the kind of meaning that we want to have for the blank. At this point, we’re likely going to have to guess, but there are strategies we can use to try to narrow down the answers a bit. We’ll talk about these in a future article.
The correct answer is inured to.
Key Takeaways for Text Completion Problems:
(1) Know your three steps: (1) read the full sentence; (2) find the target, clue, and pivot; (3) write your own fill-in, then match to the answers.
(2) While the clock is ticking, do NOT try to fully define each answer; rather, try to find the one answer that matches what you think should go into the blank. Afterwards, of course, study any words you don’t know well enough.
(3) Aim to average about 1 minute per question on text completions. For one-blank questions, plan to work a bit faster than average; for three-blank questions, you’ll likely go over the average a bit.
© ManhattanPrep, 2013