- Read for keywords:

A problem that many students have is that they get bogged down in the details of a passage and try to remember everything that they’ve read. Reading this way is a recipe to become exhausted and overwhelmed with information that you don’t need. Instead, scan for keywords – those “howevers”, “moreovers”, and “therefores” – that clue you into the passage’s structure and the author’s opinion. Being clear on those two things will allow you to get at least 70% of reading comp questions correct – a disproportionately awesome payoff.

- Map after (and even during) each paragraph:

This is a simple, point-getting tactic, but one that people often forget to apply. Instead of reading the entire passage and then taking notes, stop after each paragraph (or even each key point) and add to your passage map. I don’t know about you, but if I’m given an article about the history of refractors in telescopes (or something similarly unstimulating and GRE-like), there’s no way that I’m going to remember any important data or be able to decipher the passage’s structure unless I note something as soon as I see it. Reading this way keeps you more actively engaged, which will in turn lead to accuracy and points.

- Know the scope:

The “scope” of the passage is the specific subject matter about which the author is writing. For example, in a passage about volcanoes, the scope could be “the history of Mount St Helens’ eruptions”, “differences between composite and shield volcanoes”, “predicting a volcanic eruption”, etc – think of the scope as the phrase you’d use for the passage’s title or sub-title. Why is identifying the passage’s scope so important? Because the most common incorrect answer choices on GRE reading comp questions are choices that are outside of the passage’s scope. With this one piece of knowledge, you’re now equipped to eliminate hundreds of incorrect answer choices that are extremely tempting to the vast majority of test-takers – once again, a bit of helpful knowledge puts you miles ahead of the pack.

Consistently work these three strategies into your reading comp passage-mapping, and you’ll be a verbal ninja by Test Day – slashing through questions while your competition is muddling through passages. Best of luck, and happy mapping!

In this example, the colon after self-similarity acts as a “green light” keyword — “Don’t worry about this!” it tells you, giving you rein to drive on by. Here’s another example from the end of the passage:

Enthusiastic practitioners in the field of fractal geometry consider it a new language…

What’s the rest of the sentence going to give you? The “enthusiastic practitioners’” point of view. And is that important? Yes – different points of view are extremely important. Fortunately, the word “enthusiastic” tells you everything you need to know — these guys love fractal geometry. This keyword acts as a yellow light — you can keep driving, but keep your eyes peeled in case the point of view shifts. The next sentence begins,

They anticipate that fractal geometry’s significance…

Who’s this? The word “they” signals that it’s still the eager guys. So, don’t worry about this sentence. The next one begins,

Other mathematicians have reservations about…

Whoa — okay, there’s our first red light. The author has raised a different point of view — and these people aren’t nearly as excited about fractal geometry as the first group. So, pay attention: what’s the source of the disagreement?

Other mathematicians have reservations about the fractal geometers’ preoccupation with computer-generated graphic images and their lack of interest in theory.

Aha — so the Eager Beavers of the first group love fractal geometry and think it’s great, while the Surly Smurfs of the second group think that the people doing fractal geometry are too distracted with pretty pictures to do actual math. This is important to understand, because clashing points of view are always important in a passage, so here is where you need to slow down and pay attention.

Of course, colons and points of view aren’t the only traffic light keywords you’ll encounter on the GRE. Still, every passage constantly flashes lights at you, telling you to either breeze along, slow down, or stop and pay attention — look for these signals and your GRE reading comprehension speed will increase, not because you’re reading more quickly but because you’re reading more intelligently.

Does this quote sound like you? I hear it from a lot of you in the early days of just about every GRE class. It’s a natural way to think: if I read slowly, I’ll have less time to finish the questions. And if I have less time on the questions, I’ll do worse on the GRE. I get asked all the time for advice on speed-reading, since you often think that being a faster reader will make you a better GRE performer.

Let’s analyze this idea a bit more closely.

Imagine that you’re visited in the night by the GRE Reading Comprehension Fairy. She gives you a choice between one of two magical powers: Option A makes you read twice as fast, while Option B makes you comprehend what you read twice as well. Which power do you choose?

I don’t know about you, but not only am I picking Option B, but it’s also the easiest decision of my life. If you read the passage at whatever speed you like, then get the questions wrong on the GRE, reading faster won’t get you anywhere. You’ll make all the same mistakes, you’ll just make them…faster.

The key, then, is not to read faster, but to read smarter. Intelligent reading on the GRE means knowing when to pay attention and when to relax. You shouldn’t skim or skip any parts of the passages as you read, but you should slow down and pay more attention to important bits, and speed up and pay less attention to the unimportant bits. I’ll show you how this works with samples from a very challenging GRE passage about fractals. Here’s how it begins:

Fractal geometry is a mathematical theory devoted to the study of complex shapes called fractals. Although an exact definition of fractals has not been established, fractals commonly exhibit the property of self-similarity: …

Scared yet? Don’t be. You don’t need to know anything about fractals, but you do need to know this: what’s coming after the colon?

If you answered, “A definition of whatever the heck ‘self-similarity’ is,” give yourself credit. In fact, that sentence continues for three lines, and while your competition will sweat it out, trying to understand every facet of the definition, you’ll calmly cruise by, not worrying whether or not you understand it. If a question asks you about “self-similarity,” great, you’ll read those three lines very carefully then. But until the test-makers promise to give you points for minutely technical, detailed information, you don’t care about it.

Take a look here for part two of this blog entry and the rest of the passage on fractals and how you can read it intelligently on the GRE.

You just have to choose books that will expand your GRE vocabulary, and there is certainly one for everyone. Below is a range of recommendations sure to keep you rapt. They all have movie adaptations too, so you can engage in that other favorite summer pastime when it just gets too hot outside. Be sure to listen for more GRE vocab in the movie.

Also, keep a notebook nearby to scribble down words you don’t know so you can look them up – although the great thing about reading is that the context will often define the word for you. Conveniently, that’s also how you are tested on vocab on the GRE – Text Completion and Sentence Equivalence questions require you to use context to choose the correct answers.

Pick up these books and see if you can define the meanings of the words listed. Let us know in the comments what books you are reading this summer, and what vocab words you’ve learned from them!

Life of Pi

by Yann Martel

Page-turning: 5

Vocab level: 4

Yes, but how is the movie?: ?

With a movie version coming out in November 2012, this book is sure to become even more well-known in the near future. An Indian boy is stranded on a boat with a tiger after losing his family in a shipwreck. Definitely suspenseful, and full of great GRE vocab words like:

• disheveled
• incredulous
• deference
• forestall

Sense and Sensibility

by Jane Austen

Page-turning: 4

Vocab level: 5

Yes, but how is the movie?: 5

Summer is a great time to revisit old favorites, and anything by Austen is going to have at least one great GRE vocab word per page. So get ready for some seriously elevated language, but the romantic plots keep good readers more than engaged. Also adapted into an *excellent* movie by Ang Lee, and starring Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet in the title roles.

• affected
• resolute
• denote
• prescience

The Hunger Games

by Suzanne Collins

Page turning: 5

Vocab level: 3

Yes, but how is the movie?: 5

Who knew the biggest summer blockbuster could also be a great place to go for new GRE words? You can hunt out zingers such as:

• despondency
• irreparable
• assailant
• haggard
• plaintive

Bridget Jones’s Diary and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason

by Helen Fielding

Page-turning: 5

Vocab level: 3

Yes but how’s the movie?: 4

A daft lass searches for love in mishap after mishap in these addictively hilarious novels. While her language is not always erudite, British Bridget does throw some fifty-centers your way, such as:

•  tremulous
• proportionate
• impediment
• idyllic

My experience with countless students suggests that the fear of reading comprehension arises from a misunderstanding of what “comprehension” really is. Many seem to believe that comprehension is an understanding of things. Then, when GRE students read a passage full of things they don’t understand, they believe they don’t have a shot at understanding the passage.

Let’s do a quick test. What do you think of this sentence, which opens a famously difficult GRE passage:

“Ronald Dworkin argues that judges are in danger of uncritically embracing an erroneous theory known as legal positivism because they think that the only alternative is a theory that they (and Dworkin) see as clearly unacceptable—natural law.”

In my GRE classes, students almost unanimously agree that they’d rather do just about anything else than keep reading. Perhaps you agree. Interestingly, the sentence is actually quite simple. It just looks complicated because it throws out two unfamiliar terms — “natural law” and “legal positivism” — without defining them. Upon seeing unfamiliar words, students freeze up and fear that they’ve already lost the comprehension game.

Not so! Here’s the most valuable idea to take away from this essay: reading comprehension on the GRE isn’t the understanding of things. It’s the understanding of connections between things. What’s legal positivism? Who cares! The only thing that matters is that legal positivism is bad – which almost anyone can tell from the emphatic words “danger,” “uncritically,” and “erroneous.” Natural law must be terrible too, given that it’s “clearly unacceptable.” So all you really need to get out of the sentence is that two ideas are out there, and they both stink.

My favorite way to think of comprehension is to see it as a field of circles with connecting lines. In my mind there’s a “legal positivism” circle and a “bad” circle, and because those two ideas are connected, there’s a line between them. I’ve taught the Dworkin passage several dozen times, and I still don’t really know what’s inside the “legal positivism” circle. Lucky for me, I don’t have to — and neither do you. As long as you see the connecting lines between familiar and unfamiliar terms, you can understand any GRE passage well enough to score its points.

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 what year Superman was introduced, but you care about WHY the author told you that. The passage may then go on to describe how the powers attributed to Superman have changed over time. In that case, knowing that Superman has been around for 70+ years might be important.
• Prior knowledge is not welcome on Test Day. Forget everything you might know about Superman — everything  you need to know will be contained within the passage. Wrong answer choices play on things that test-takers understand to be logically true, but if those facts aren’t mentioned in the passage, you don’t care.
• If a passage tells you Superman has a twin sister, then as far as you are concerned, he has a twin sister. The passage text is TRUE. Period. You may question texts as much as you like in real-world reading, but on the GRE, accept that whatever the passage is telling you is correct.

Bolded Statement questions should be tackled the same way as other Reading Comprehension question types. In these questions, you REALLY don’t care about the facts or details. You ONLY care about the purpose of the statements, and you consider each statement separately. Is it an opinion? An example? An argument? If it is an argument, is it the passage’s primary or secondary argument, or perhaps a counterargument? Is it evidence, and if so, of what? You care about the purpose of each statement in relation to the other sentences in the passage.

Let me repeat that. Just as with other question types, you must consider Bolded Statements in the context of the passage as a whole. Do not skip the un-bold statements; they are your context clues for figuring out the role the Bolded Statements play.

Have a question about grammar, punctuation, usage, or style? Email me at jennifer.land@kaplan.com and put “blog question” in your subject line. Then look for a response here!

“Almost all of the answer choices in the Reading Comp section seem like they could be correct – it’s hopeless…”

If you haven’t uttered one of the above statements about the GRE’s Reading Comp questions, then you are probably somewhere in the spectrum between these two attitudes of naively confident and unduly uncertain.

Indeed, you will need to know how to read – but your present activity proves that you are in check with that prerequisite…

So, testing more than just your ability to discern words from groups of letters, the GRE attempts to assess your ability to think critically and read strategically – with purpose.  Moreover, the Reading Comp passages and their corresponding questions are measuring your analytical skills as they are performed under time constraints.  Specifically, how well can you determine the best definition of a word in context?  Given detailed and dense prose, are you able to identify an author’s tone and then determine her main idea and purpose?  Rather than only partake in the inefficiency of time-intensive rereading, can you initially glean information from text and then perceive ideas in such a manner as to draw accurate inferences from them?

The answer is YES, you can…but only if you learn to read in a way much differently than most folks tend to read books at the beach, differently even than the method you probably used to read text books to earn your degree.  Strategic reading is a skill and, as such, it requires methodology built around it and – here it comes – practice!

Great preparation for GRE success must include learning and practicing a device for efficiently and proficiently gathering sufficient data and intelligence from our initial read so that we can adeptly answer 1-3 questions while making only quick, referent analysis of the passage.

Far from having multiple correctly-worded answer choices (although the New GRE does now include questions, “Select all that apply” which have multiple answer choices that are correct), the traditional multiple-choice question has only one choice which is worded in such a way to be correct given the stated question.  Furthermore, the other 4 choices have serious flaws, however hidden to us those flaws may seemingly feel.  It’s NOT about feel, this task is categorical and the passage will “tell” us all that we need it to, thus allowing us to predict the right choice, if only we are well-trained and well-practiced in the scheme of skills to do so.

Oh, you haven’t heard about that yet? I should back up and start at the beginning then…

Reading Comprehension on the GRE has traditionally been similar to that on other standardized tests.  You may remember the staple question types, such as Global, Detail, and Inference questions, to name a few. Well-honed passage mapping techniques make the process for answering such questions fairly routine. In fact, if you’re like me, you may have found your brain on autopilot as you zipped through your last set of Reading Comprehension questions as that tiny voice inside your head gently cried out for a bigger challenge. Imagine my surprise and delight when I cracked open one of the brand spanking new Reading Comp passages for the new GRE and saw question stems like the following:

Which of the following statements, if true, would most seriously weaken the position of the legislature’s critics?

Which of the following scenarios would best support the author’s theory?

Meet the Reading Comprehension Reasoning Questions

So what are these new Reasoning Questions, and how am I supposed to handle them? Glad you asked! Logical Reasoning questions can ask you to strengthen or weaken a given argument, spot an unstated assumption, or point out a flaw in the author’s reasoning. Some passages will even have highlighted statements and corresponding questions that ask about their purpose or relationship. The common thread here is more critical thinking and less memorizing of passage material. (Three guesses as to why the GRE would be interested in testing such skills!)

“So if these questions just came out of the blue, how can Kaplan or anyone else prepare me for them?”  I can’t speak for anyone else, but Kaplan can easily prepare you for them. Why is that? Well, it just so happens that, while Reasoning Questions are new to Reading Comprehension on the GRE, they are old hat with LSAT and GMAT, two other standardized exams that Kaplan has tons of experience preparing test takers like yourself for. That’s right—they may be fresh off the assembly line for the new GRE, but Kaplan has actually been preparing people to ace Reasoning Questions for decades.

So when that sneaky GRE passage tries to surprise you with these quirky new questions on Test Day, just smile. While Reasoning Questions may be unexpected by your competition, you will already have the inside scoop on how they work!

Asiatic lions are easily lost amid the trees as they move stealthily through India’s Gir Forest National Park. Similarly, the correct answers for Global questions are often missed if test-takers focus too closely on distracting details. Happily, just as zoologists have learned how to track these beautiful creatures, you too can find success in identifying the right answer on Test Day.

To begin, Global questions always ask about the Reading Comprehension passage as a whole and use wording like, “primary purpose,” “primarily concerned with,” and “main idea.” Since the correct answer must reflect the main idea of the entire passage, you can immediately eliminate any answer choices that refer only to one paragraph out of the entire passage, since they are simply too narrow to reflect the author’s main purpose. You can also cross off any answer choices that are too extreme. The tone of a GRE passage is always within a range of slightly negative to slightly positive, which means they are never hyperbolic. When you see answer choices with the words like always, never, best, or worst, you can happily eliminate them and increase your odds of choosing the correct answer. In addition, you can do a vertical scan in which you look at just the first word within the five answer choices. Oftentimes, you will read verbs like, “encouraging, describing, criticizing, comparing, resolving” or “convince, recommend, dispute, examine.” In this situation, you can eliminate verbs that mischaracterize the author’s overall purpose in writing the passage. Almost always, an answer choice that contains the word “criticizing” will be too extreme.Sometimes, simply finding the correct verb to describe the author’s purpose is enough to narrow the answer choices down to two, or even one!

Keep in mind that with Global questions (as with Detail questions), answer choices can be out of scope. The scope of the passage refers to the specific area within a broader topic that the author addresses with the passage. For example, you may read a passage about the author Virginia Woolf. It would be impossible to cover every aspect of Virginia Woolf’s writing career in one GRE passage, so the scope denotes the particular aspect of Virginia Woolf’s writing that the author discusses. If the passage focuses on the intricacies of two of Woolf’s essays, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, you know that the scope of the passage doesn’t include her more widely known works like novels To the Lighthouse and Orlando. Therefore, you can eliminate any answer choices that refer to parts of Woolf’s other novels, as they are not within the scope of the passage.

The more time you spend in the Gir Forest, the more likely you are to pick out among the trees the majestic glint of the Asiatic lion’s amber eyes. On Test Day, you must be just as deliberate in your search for the right answer. Of course, you will most likely need fewer cans of bug spray.

Waza Park lions may be smaller than their subspecies counterparts, but their teeth are just as sharp. These characteristics are similar to those of Detail questions, which may appear manageable, but require just as much practice as other more ferocious-looking questions. Detail questions test your comprehension of specific things that the passage’s author states, using wording like “according to the passage,” “as stated in line 7,” and “the author makes which of the following statements.” This straightforward question type is a wonderful opportunity to earn a higher score on Test Day, but just as with Waza Park lions, these questions must still be approached with care.

Instead of breezing through this type of question, it is best to stop after reading the question stem, assess the situation (often by locating the relevant detail in the context of the passage) and predict an answer, and then make a purposeful move by matching your prediction to the correct answer choice. In addition, a solid understanding of common wrong answer choices can mean the difference between a copacetic situation like a purring cat and a less favorable outcome like an unexpected pounce.

For Detail questions, one common wrong-answer type is the out-of-scope answer choice. This category includes answer choices that are out of the range of the passage as a whole, but also answer choices that are refer to the wrong part of the passage. When the question gives you a line reference, you do not want to stray too far from where the question directs you. Also, when the question mentions a specific paragraph, beware of answer choices that deal with information from a different paragraph.

Another popular wrong answer choice is a distortion. These wrong answers can be particularly tricky because the answer choice will mention details from the passage, but will twist them so they no longer represent the author’s point. For example, the author may posit that as Jane Austen continued to write, her characters, such as Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, became more representative of pre-feminist ideals. A distortion of this information would be an answer choice that says, “Jane Austen purposefully used Elizabeth Bennet to voice her personal dissatisfaction with uneducated, rural women, an idea that did not permeate her first novel.” You can eliminate this answer choice because while the author did say that Austen’s feminist undertones strengthened throughout her career, the author does not define feminism as a dissatisfaction with uneducated, rural women. Nor does the author say that Austen used her characters purposefully to illustrate pre-feminist ideals. In short, this answer choice is a distortion of the information in the passage.

Misused details can be very alluring answer choices, but just as trained tamers know when to refrain from sticking their hands too close to lions’ noses, practiced test takers stay away from answer choices that, while they reflect something stated at some point within the passage, do not answer the question as it is written. A good example of this type would be an answer choice that states a fact from the passage about one of Austen’s characters, such as “Elizabeth Bennet is now thought of as an archetype of the modern woman,” but does not answer the question posed: “In the third paragraph, the author states that the fact that Jane Austen never married had what impact on her writing?” A more appropriate answer choice would be, “Even if Jane Austen had married, it is likely that her astute observations of social interactions would not be invalidated.” This answer is both supported by the author and specifically addresses the question about Austen’s marital status.

In all, the more exposure you have to approaching Detail questions, the more efficient you will become in discarding wrong answer choices that fall into these common categories. Remember: eliminating four rotten answers is the same thing as finding the one right answer . . . just like dodging four scary pounces from a lion is the same thing as successfully keeping yourself in one piece!