GRE Verbal Reasoning

Class Location: The Internet.

Description: This course is designed to help students prepare for the Verbal Reasoning section of the GRE.

Objective: Score well on the Verbal Reasoning test.

The verbal reasoning section of the GRE tests your ability to solve problems by reasoning with words. To reason effectively in a verbal setting, you must be able to identify, understand, and analyze relationships between words or groups of words in a larger narrative. The verbal reasoning section includes four types of questions: analogies, antonyms, sentence completion, and reading comprehension.

To answer the analogy questions, you must identify the relationship between two words in a pair and then transfer that relationship to a second word pair to determine which two words form the same relationship. The questions present a word pair and then ask you to select another word pair that has the same relationship as the first. Some sample relationships are kind, size, spatial contiguity, and degree.

The antonym questions test both your vocabulary and your reasoning ability. They require you to reason from a given concept to determine its opposite. These questions generally stick to nouns, verbs, and adjectives. The multiple-choice answers may be either single words or phrases. Determining the correct antonym may require only general knowledge of a word, or you may need to make subtle distinctions among the answer choices.

The sentence completion questions provide a sentence with a pair of blanks and require you to select which words best fill in the blanks. These questions test your ability to use different syntax and grammar clues to understand the overall meaning of the sentence. They require you to analyze the relationships between the different parts of the sentence to determine which of the answer choices give the sentence the most logical overall meaning and make it stylistically and grammatically correct.

The reading comprehension questions require you to understand and analyze a written passage, including explicit statements, underlying meanings, and the implications of both. Each passage provides a discussion on a particular topic. You then must analyze concepts such as how a word relates to a bigger segment of the text; the relationships between different ideas in the passage; and the author’s relationship to the discussion topic.