Verbal Reasoning Question Types

The GRE MST contains two Verbal Reasoning sections with 20 questions each. Each section lasts 30 minutes and contains a selection of the following question types:

• Text Completion
• Sentence Equivalence
• Reading Comprehension

The Verbal Reasoning portion of the GRE rewards a strong, university-level vocabulary and facility with understanding and analyzing written material. Specifically, it evaluates your ability to do the following:

• accurately paraphrase sentences and paragraphs
• derive a word’s meaning based on its context
• detect relationships among words
• understand the logic of sentences and paragraphs
• draw inferences
• recognize major, minor, and irrelevant points
• summarize ideas
• understand passage and paragraph structure
• recognize an author’s tone, purpose, and perspective

The GRE assesses those skills with an assortment of Text Completion, Sentence Equivalence, and Reading Comprehension items. The following chart shows how many questions of each type you can expect, as well as the average amount of time you should spend per question.

	Text Completion	Sentence Equivalence	Reading Comprehension
Number of Questions	Approx. 6	Approx. 4	Approx. 10
Time per Question	1–1.5 minutes	1 minute	1–3 minutes, depending on the length, to read the passage and 1 minute to answer each question