By doing so, you will make the passage more relatable to YOU, and ultimately you should be able to read with greater focus. For example, even if you are reading about a topic that bores you, pretend that you are the person making the argument. Just focus on what is in front of you, word by word, line by line. Don’t worry about how things are going at work, or what you will eat for dinner, or even how long you are taking to read through the passage. Answering questions is like any task: The more times you do it carefully and successfully, the faster you become at doing it carefully and successfully.Īnother component of understanding what you are reading is being “present” when reading. If you can learn to get answers taking your time, you can learn to speed up. Your goal should be to take all the time you need to understand exactly what is being said and arrive at the correct answer. If you don't understand something, go back and read it one sentence at a time, even one word at a time, not moving on until you understand what you have just read. You have to learn to comprehend what you read, keep it all straight, and use what you are reading to arrive at correct answers. At this point, your best bet is to focus on getting the correct answers to questions, taking as much time as you need to see key details and understand the logic of what you are reading. Thus, you likely have to slow down in order to (eventually) speed up. When students incorrectly answer multi-paragraph questions, it’s often partly because they do not truly understand what they have just read. Regarding multi-paragraph passages, you need to focus on understanding what you are reading. Did you misread the passage? Did you make a careless mistake? Did you misidentify the conclusion or assumption? As you analyze these mistakes, you’ll better be able to strengthen your weaknesses. When going over wrong answers from your practice, thoroughly analyzing what went wrong. Ideally, you’d follow up your learning with focused practice. Single-paragraph passages generally ask questions such as “which of the following strengthens the argument” or “which of the following weakens the argument,” or ask you to “find the paradox.” To excel in these questions, you first need to individually learn and practice each type of single-paragraph question. Reading Comprehension is broken up into two smaller categories, single-paragraph passages and multi-paragraph passages. By using context clues, you often can correctly answer questions without even knowing the exact vocab word necessary. In addition to learning new vocab, you need to become skilled in looking for and using context clues in TC and SE questions. Furthermore, try using new vocab words in your everyday writing you’ll be pleasantly surprised by how well the words stick. As you learn new vocab words, create an original sentence using each word and put that sentence on a flash card. Memorizing vocab words can be tedious, so try to make the process fun for yourself.

Although there is no magic number of vocab questions to learn, start with 2,000, and see how you perform in SE and TC questions.

To start, you need to develop a solid base of vocab. Here is some general advice you can follow to improve your GRE verbal skills.

Gre powerprep 2 in the sequence bk