Three-Letter Words: Ire
Some of the most perplexing words on the GRE are diminutive. Who doesn’t see PAN : REVIEW and metaphorically scratch his or her head, or wonder what, exactly, a nib or a gin is on its own? Welcome to Three-Letter Words. A few of them might make you want to deploy some four-letter words.
Ire means “anger or wrath” and comes from the same root as irascible and irate. To raise someone’s ire is to anger that person.
If it’s helpful as a mnemonic, you could remember ire by imagining a very angry man named Ira, or by imagining that everyone in Ireland is angry, although we certainly wouldn’t want to stereotype men named Ira, or the Irish, and certainly not Irish men named Ira.
Reading the above paragraph about ire would likely make an Irishman named Ira quite irate. No one wants to raise the ire of an irascible Irish Ira.
Try a sample Analogies problem:
MOLLIFY : IRE ::
A. socialize : apathy
B. rattle : equanimity
C. antagonize : desire
D. quarantine : happiness
E. silence : bombast
Choose your own answer, then click “more for the solution.
To mollify is to pacify or appease. A good strategy for Analogies problems is to write your own linking sentence before viewing the choices. You might have something like “to ______ is to reduce someone else’s _______.” It will be important here that mollify is something a person does to someone else.
A. To socialize is not to reduce someone’s apathy.
B. To rattle someone is to disconcert, disturb, or confuse that person. Equanimity is calmness. To rattle someone is to reduce his or her equanimity. This is our answer.
C. Antagonize and desire have no definitional relationship to one another.
D. Quarantine and happiness have no definitional relationship to one another.
E. You can silence someone else, and that would have the effect of depriving that person of speech (bombast is pretentious speech), but the two words have no definitional relationship.
The answer is B.