The Verbal section of the GRE is designed to test your verbal reasoning abilities. This chapter will explain what types of questions ETS uses to accomplish that. You’ll also see how the concepts of Personal Order of Difficulty and Process of Elimination apply to the Ver­bal section. Finally, you’ll learn what role vocabulary plays in achieving a good score on the Verbal section.

What’s On It?

Now that ETS has redesigned the GRE, the company claims that the new Verbal section will accomplish the following:

• Place a greater emphasis on analytical skills and on understanding vocabulary in context rather than in isolation
• Use more text-based materials
• Contain a broader range of reading selections
• Test skills that are more closely aligned with those used in graduate school
• Expand the range of computer-enabled tasks

While those sound like lofty and admirable goals, what they really translate into are the following changes:

• There won’t be questions that involve analogies or antonyms on this test, as there have been on past tests (and good riddance!).
• You’ll see new question types that weren’t on the old version of the test: Critical Reasoning questions and Sentence Equivalence (in which you search for synonyms—somewhat easier and more reason­able than the antonyms questions, but not by much).
• The test writers made minor tweaks to the Text Completion and Reading Comprehension questions (we’ll get into how these are con­structed later in this section).
• You’ll see some wacky-looking question formats that you’ve probably never seen before.
• Though they say the new version of the test de-emphasizes vocabulary, there’s no getting around the fact that the more vocabulary you know when you sit down to take the test, the better off you’ll be.

Of course, ETS claims that the new GRE is a better and more valid test than the previous incarnation, but we have our doubts. For one, there hasn’t been much testing done on the new question types. In other words, ETS hasn’t tried these questions out on test takers to see how well they evaluated knowledge or ability. Second, the new test is longer and less convenient for students—but more on that later. Suffice it to say that we’re not totally convinced that this test represents an improvement over those of the past.

There are three types of questions on the Verbal section of the test. They are:

• Text Completions
• Sentence Equivalence
• Reading Comprehension