From the course: Test Prep: GRE

Overview of verbal reasoning

From the course: Test Prep: GRE

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Overview of verbal reasoning

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- [Voiceover] Verbal Reasoning, hence it's name, will test your verbal skills like vocabulary and reading comprehension, but it will also test your reasoning skills, like identifying the function of part of a passage, realizing how a certain fact would affect an argument. In this video, I'll go over what you'll find in this type of GRE section. So, Verbal Reasoning sections fall into two general question types. First, there are fill-in-the-blank style questions, for which you'll select a word or words that logically complete sentences. These questions are either text completion, for which there will be one, two or three blanks to fill in, or sentence equivalence, which are sentences with one blank, for which you need to pick two different words that both work. So, these are gonna test your vocab and your reading comprehension at the same time. Then, we have reading passages. So, these questions are gonna involve a passage, which can be as short as one sentence or as long as several paragraphs. These questions fall into three main types: normal comprehension, function, and logic. So, in addition to multiple choice questions, reading passage questions will sometimes include questions that ask you to click on a certain sentence within a passage. So, there will also be questions for which there may be more than one correct answer, you'll have to select all of the answers that are correct. So, in later videos, I go into a lot more detail 'bout how all of these different questions work. So, the basic skills of Verbal Reasoning tests are vocab, comprehension, identification of the role parts of passages play, and the ability to think logically. In upcoming videos in this section, I'll begin explaining how to build these skills. Fortunately, since you've been reading for a long, long time, some of these skills will already be in place. So, practice with verbal questions written by ETS, which is the maker of the GRE, is essential, since these questions are reliably gonna play by the same rules as those you'll see on the real GRE. They're also usually more complexing questions written by any other company, so they're much better practice. So, these ETS questions can be found in the ETS books that are published by ETS. Since there's a finite number of these questions though, make sure you learn some verbal technique before you work through them, since you'll only have one chance to see them for the first time.

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