The Manhattan Prep GRE Reading Comprehension Study Guide
Did you know that you can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GRE courses absolutely free? We’re not kidding! Check out our upcoming courses here.
Did you know that you can find everything you ever wanted to know about Reading Comprehension here on our blog? Well, okay, perhaps I’m exaggerating just a little but not that much! Follow the links!
How to Read
Yes, I really did just title this section How to Read. What do you mean, you already know how to read? You do? Yes, of course you do but the way we read on a standardized test such as the GRE is not quite the way we read in the real world. Your boss is never going to come to you and say, Here, I need you to read this and write up a summary “ oh, and you have 3 minutes to do so.
Start with this general discussion of how to read a GRE RC passage. That first article covers all of the highlights, but it’s abstract; when you’re done with it, you can move on to this example of how to read a specific RC passage.
Want a bit more? Here’s a great article regarding tactics you can take to learn to read and comprehend more quickly.
Language: Idioms and Vocabulary
We already need to study vocabulary and idiomatic expressions for the vocab question types “ but did you realize that this study will help you on the reading portions as well?
Check out this post on idiomatic language; it explains what idiomatic expressions are (along with examples) and talks about how to study such language. There are also a million vocabulary posts on our blog; I won’t link to them all, but you can search them out as inspiration while you drill that vocab.
Do you have a lot of time before you plan to take the test? If so, you can work in some longer-term study that will actually be more enjoyable than the norm: reading books “ actual novels! In June, we published a Summer Reading List, and we followed that post up with a second one in August. We suggested a fairly wide variety of books, so pick out one or two that look interesting to you and start reading!
Answering Questions
Let’s move on to the heart of the matter (that’s an idiomatic expression, by the way!). Just how do we answer these questions?
There are multiple question types on the GRE and I’ve got examples of all of them for you, but we’re going to start in two very important places: main idea questions and also how to study RC questions in general.
This first article (and definitely look at this one first) talks about how to analyze RC questions, that is, when we’re done answering a question, how do we review in such a way that we get the most learning possible from that question?
The specific example used in that article is a Main Idea question, so that article also addresses what to do with Main Idea questions in general.
Next, the two most common specific question types are Look-Up questions and Inference questions. Look-Up questions are pretty much what they sound like: the passage says something and the question asks you to find that something (possibly worded a bit differently) in the answer choices. We have to look it up.
Inference questions, on the other hand, are designed to get us to deduce something from information that’s in the passage “ we’re supposed to infer something that must be true / is definitively supported by information that is found somewhere in the passage. First, we have to find and understand the relevant information; then we have to figure out which of the 5 answer choices can be supported definitively using that information.
There are some other more minor (that is, less commonly tested) question types as well. A question might, for example, ask us to Weaken an idea or a conclusion. Other times, we’re asked why an author discusses something, a type we call Author’s Purpose.
Takeaways for studying RC
As with any other question type, RC requires an understanding of what they’re going to give us, what kinds of analysis they want us to do for the various question types, and an ability to read and process information much more quickly than we typically would in the real world.
It’s critical to learn how to tackle RC from a standardized-test-taking perspective. We can’t just read the way we typically would in a normal circumstance.
Next, it’s critical to analyze our work and thought processes when reviewing questions “ as with any other question type. Don’t just ask yourself why the right answer is right and why the wrong one is wrong. Figure out why you made mistakes or missed things (maybe you didn’t know an idiom? maybe you need to study idioms in general?) and how to avoid traps that they set for you (why is the wrong answer tempting to pick? what is the right answer tempting to eliminate?). You can learn more about this in the How to Analyze article.
Okay, that’s all I’ve got for you today. As we write additional RC articles (for example, on some of the other minor question types), we’ll update this Study Guide article as well. Good luck with RC and happy studying!
Want more guidance from our GRE gurus? You can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GRE courses absolutely free! We’re not kidding. Check out our upcoming courses here.
Stacey Koprince is a Manhattan Prep instructor based in Montreal, Canada and Los Angeles, California. Stacey has been teaching the GMAT, GRE, and LSAT for more than 15 years and is one of the most well-known instructors in the industry. Stacey loves to teach and is absolutely fascinated by standardized tests.