Aaron Burr said, ”Never do today what you can put off till tomorrow. Delay may give clearer light as to what is best to be done.” Procrastination gets a bad rap, but it can be a useful tool on the GRE. When you solve algebraic equations containing difficult arithmetic, delay your calculations as long as possible. Here’s a powerful illustration:

 18  =  24

3.06     x

A lot of people would start to do 18/3.06 here, and right away the problem would break down. That’s an exhausting computation to make without a calculator, and there’s abundant opportunity for error. Here’s the thing: you don’t actually care what 18/3.06 is. You care what x is. So solve for x first, and then worry about the arithmetic. The first step here is to cross-multiply:

18 * x = 24 * 3.06

Again, some people would reach this step and do 24 * 3.06. But why bother? Finish solving for x first:

x

It’s a workaday fracas in my house: once my husband comes home, the denigration of my television choices begins. He seems to believe that reality shows about fashion are jejune.

He is, of course, wrong… at least about Project Runway. If you haven’t seen it, you’re missing out on the lexical gems of Tim Gunn, who advises the designers. In his book, Gunn asserted that “Few activities are as delightful as learning new vocabulary.” It wasn’t until I began prepping for the GRE that I could appreciate that sentiment. Previously, I had ignored “big words” and even scoffed at their use. How could someone deign to say something I didn’t understand?

Now that I appreciate their nuances, I find “big words” (I use quotes because GRE words, while often abstruse, aren’t always long) to be really fun. And so, demonstrably, does Tim Gunn. As the Project Runway contestants

We have been dealing in the translation of word problems into workable equations and expressions on the GRE.  Despite our ability to accurately switch words into symbols, we can still be led astray if we don’t place and prioritize our symbols and operations into a proper scheme.

Efficiently refreshing your knowledge base of math is one of the more important aspects of any quality GRE preparation.   For instance, the order of operations is certainly something of which almost all of us had a decent understanding at one time or another, albeit an understanding which has, perhaps, waned and grown cobwebs over the years.

Most of us came to our knowledge base of operations order via PEMDAS and its common mnemonic, “Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally.”  Let’s further examine this prioritization process:

• Parentheses go first, starting with the innermost set of parentheses
• Exponents are

My GRE students are quite aware of my love of the show 30 Rock. I always find a way to work it into our before-class chat and even into our lessons.

That’s because 30 Rock, if you haven’t seen it, is one of the most brilliantly written shows on television. Tina Fey and her adroit team of writers weave together countless and disparate plotlines into one homogenous, hilarious conclusion.

The reason I bring this up is that the very same thing happens with the quantitative content on the GRE. It’s slightly less hilarious, but it really does all come together.

Case in point: special triangles. Knowing these is a GRE lifesaver, as long as you know how to use them. The problem is, they require some prerequisite math knowledge to be used to their best advantage.

Any Kaplan student with a laminated strategy sheet can tell you that

When asked recently for a student success story, I immediately thought of Heather (not her actual name). Like a sizable portion of students who come to Kaplan, Heather had already taken the GRE after preparing on her own, and her scores were not high enough. She was a senior in college, with a hefty course load and a time-consuming job in her field that required a lot of travel.

Right from the start of class, Heather and I were in frequent email contact, figuring out how she should structure her study time so she could take her test a couple weeks after the end of a twice a week class. She was a diligent, goal-oriented student.

Her Test Day came, and she fell short of the scores she needed to be considered for the grad program she wanted. Her math score was a little over what she needed,

The new GRE features an on-screen calculator, which is as much a trap as it is a tool. Still, I find that many of my students use the calculator far more than they need to, because they don’t understand arithmetic. To be clear, they can do arithmetic just fine — they just don’t understand it, and this lapse in understanding costs them time and points on the GRE.

Here’s a quick sanity check. How would you do the following:

12 * 14

7     3

Were you tempted to make a new fraction, putting 12 * 14 on top and 7 * 3 on bottom? A lot of people do it this way, because they were taught as fifth graders that to multiply two fractions, you “multiply across.” Of course, 12 * 14 is a pain, and dividing that by 21 isn’t any fun either. No wonder most GRE

Using punctuation correctly is essential to representing yourself successfully in your writing. One punctuation mark that gives people trouble is the apostrophe. So let’s brush up on using apostrophes correctly.

An apostrophe serves as a placeholder for something that has been omitted. We use it most often in contractions. When you combine two words, you usually drop one or more letters: For example, do not is contracted by joining the words and omitting the second o. That’s why we use an apostrophe; it takes the place of the o we dropped when we combined those words into one: don’t.

When words are pluralized, we seldom drop or omit anything from the original. You may need to “change the y to i and add -es,” as the plural rule is often taught: company becomes companies, for example. But usually you need only add -s or -es to form the proper plural form of

Perhaps more than any other section of the GRE, reading comprehension is the subject of a lot of mysticism. People seem to think that reading is a “life skill,” and that if you haven’t mastered it by the time you take the GRE, you’re out of luck. Those who have the skill can read the most abstruse of passages and “just get them,” as though struck by divine bolts of understanding. Meanwhile, those less fortunate are doomed to wallow in perpetual ignorance and confusion.

All of this is nonsense. Reading comprehension is a skill, and like all skills, it is statistically impossible that every single person in the world will be equally good at it. The fact that some people are naturally better than others is not a surprise, but a mathematical certainty. Those who are good at reading comprehension aren’t good because heavenly inspiration keeps showering

Like the Bermuda Triangle, GRE triangle questions often bring with them a sense of mystery and uncertainty. However, while the Bermuda Triangle will likely remain a mystery, triangles themselves can be understood.

Let’s look at a GRE triangle question:

The first thing you want to do on a problem like this is ask yourself: What do I know? We know the lengths of sides AB, BD and BC.  We also know that angle BDC is a right (90^o) angle.

The next thing you should ask yourself is: What does the question ask me to find? The question above asks us to find the perimeter of triangle ABC.  The perimeter is the distance all the way around.

Finally, you should ask yourself: What do I need to know in order to answer the question? Before we can find the perimeter of

Recently a reader asked me to post about strategies for long Reading Comprehension passages and Bolded Statement questions. (Mohamed also asked about vocab strategies, which I will discuss soon. Be sure to see previous vocabulary-related posts from my Kaplan colleagues.)

The Kaplan New GRE Verbal Workbook includes a chapter devoted to Reading Comprehension, as well as sets of practice questions and additional resources. One of these resources is a list of additional tips for tackling the Reading Comprehension section, including Bolded Statements questions. These tips are found on pages 78-80, and I’m going to borrow from them here.

There are differences between real-world reading and reading GRE passages is that on the GRE:

• On Test Day, you don’t care about the facts in the passage — you only care about ideas. A passage might tell you that the character Superman first appeared in 1938. You don’t care