What to Expect on the GRE Verbal Section

As you saw in the pretest, there are four kinds of Verbal section questions analogies, antonyms, sentence completions, and reading comprehension questions. These questions are designed to test your comprehension of the logical relationships between words, as well as your ability to understand and think critically about complex written material. 

Analogies test your vocabulary and your ability to identify relationships between pairs of words (and the concepts they represent). In each analogy question, you will be presented with a pair of words in all capital letters, in a format that looks like this  

Then you will be given five answer choices, a-e, in the same format but in lowercase letters. You must choose the answer choice that contains words with the same relationship to each other as the initial pair has. Straightforward techniques can help you divine the relationships, and they are easily mastered with practice. You will become familiar with these techniques later in this book. 

The relationship of all antonyms is one of opposition. You want to pick the answer choice (i.e., the word or concept) that is most nearly the opposite of the question word. The question word will be presented in all capital letters, for example, FLOOD. The answer choices will consist of either single words or phrases, lettered a-e, and you must select the word or phrase that is most nearly opposite in meaning to the initial word. 

Remember that on the GRE, you must assess arguments and answer questions based only on the information presented on the test. For the moment, forget what you might know or how you might feel about the topic or issue. Base your answer only on the argument and evidence in front of you. 

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