{"id":683,"date":"2010-09-10T06:34:50","date_gmt":"2010-09-10T11:34:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.manhattangre.com\/blog\/?p=683"},"modified":"2019-08-30T16:52:57","modified_gmt":"2019-08-30T16:52:57","slug":"three-letter-words-lax","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.manhattanprep.com\/gre\/blog\/three-letter-words-lax\/","title":{"rendered":"Three-Letter Words: Lax"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/\/www.manhattanprep.com\/gre\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/19\/2010\/06\/definition-300x223.jpg\" alt=\"Text book word close-up\" width=\"190\" class=\"alignright\" \/><em>Some of the most perplexing words on the GRE are diminutive.  Who doesn&#8217;t see PAN : REVIEW and metaphorically scratch his or her head, or wonder what, exactly, a nib\u009d or a gin\u009d is on its own?  Welcome to <A HREF=\"\/\/www.manhattanprep.com\/gre\/blog\/index.php\/category\/gre-strategies\/three-letter-words-gre-strategies\/\">Three-Letter Words<\/A>.  A few of them might make you want to deploy some four-letter words.<\/em><\/p>\n<hr>\n<p><A HREF=\"\/\/www.thefreedictionary.com\/lax\">Lax<\/A> is an easy one.  If you&#8217;ve got <i>relax<\/i>, you can guess what <i>lax<\/i> means (loose, slack, careless, negligent, vague).<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Her morals may have been <i>lax<\/i>, but no one was prepared for the <i>overlaxness<\/i> of her parenting skills: not only did she keep quiet as her children picked their noses, she didn&#8217;t even intervene when they picked <i>each other&#8217;s noses<\/i>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Try a sample Sentence Completion problem:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Accustomed to a manager so <i>lax<\/i> that he allowed everyone to come to work in cutoffs and leave whenever the weather was nice, the employees were __________ at the _________ of their authoritarian new boss&#8217;s regime.<\/p>\n<p>A.\tebullient &#8230; uptight<br \/>\nB.\tshocked &#8230; pedagogy<br \/>\nC.\taghast &#8230; asperity<br \/>\nD.\tintrepid &#8230; harshness<br \/>\nE.\tenervated &#8230; strictness\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Choose your own answer, then click &#8220;more\u009d for the solution.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>A good strategy for Sentence Completion problems is to fill in the blanks with your own words &#8212; justifying your choices with clues from the sentence &#8212; before viewing the choices.  We know that the employees were accustomed to a <i>lax<\/i> work environment and that the new boss was &#8220;authoritarian.&#8221;  Thus, in the first blank we might fill in something liked &#8220;shocked,&#8221; and in the second blank, something like &#8220;strictness.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Reading down the first word of each answer choice, only <i>shocked<\/i> and <i>aghast<\/i> have the correct meaning.<\/p>\n<p>Of remaining choices B and C, only <i>asperity<\/i> has the meaning of &#8220;strictness.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The answer is C.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Some of the most perplexing words on the GRE are diminutive. Who doesn&#8217;t see PAN : REVIEW and metaphorically scratch his or her head, or wonder what, exactly, a nib\u009d or a gin\u009d is on its own? Welcome to Three-Letter Words. A few of them might make you want to deploy some four-letter words. Lax [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,13],"tags":[324],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-683","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gre-strategies","category-vocabulary","tag-three-letter-words"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.manhattanprep.com\/gre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/683","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.manhattanprep.com\/gre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.manhattanprep.com\/gre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.manhattanprep.com\/gre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.manhattanprep.com\/gre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=683"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.manhattanprep.com\/gre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/683\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7362,"href":"https:\/\/www.manhattanprep.com\/gre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/683\/revisions\/7362"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.manhattanprep.com\/gre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=683"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.manhattanprep.com\/gre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=683"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.manhattanprep.com\/gre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=683"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.manhattanprep.com\/gre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=683"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}