#0 - Shorter GRE - Verbal Section: Question type breakdown
#1 - Introduction
#2 - Definitional Sentences
#3 - Punctuaction:Colon,Semicolon, and Dash


The GRE Verbal section assessments are provided by the Educational Testing Service (ETS) themselves:

The Verbal Reasoning measure of the GRE® General Test assesses your ability to analyze and evaluate written material and synthesize information obtained from it, analyze relationships among component parts of sentences and recognize relationships among words and concepts.

Specifically:

A Text Completion question includes a sentence or paragraph that has one, two, or three missing words or phrases, and a short list of word or phrase options to fill in those missing parts. The number of choices provided corresponds to the number of missing words - five choices for one missing word and three choices for two or three missing words. Each option offered has a distinct meaning; your goal is to pick the word or words that best fit the context of the sentence. If there are more than one missing words, then selecting only one correct word will not earn partial credit. Text Completion questions might have more straightforward vocabulary but can be challenging to interpret.

Sentence Equivalence tasks require selecting two words from a list of six options. These words should mean the same thing and fit into a sentence with one missing word. You cannot earn partial credit by selecting only one correct word. Although Sentence Completion questions are easier to understand, they have more challenging vocabulary. The correct answers are always synonyms OR alike in meaning, and you may fall for a trap word if a supporting word does not have a match.

Both question types have perfect grammar and answer choices that fit perfectly. Therefore, the meaning of the words is the basis for making a selection. To eliminate wrong answers, the best approach is to find the text's meaning without the answer choices. Plugging in each word can give the sentence a different meaning.

Essentially, you must have three skills to attack the TC/SE questions:

• It is important to recognize significant details in a sentence and refrain from being distracted by irrelevant information. Every Text Completion question provides clues that guide you towards the right answer. The hints within the sentence will always support only one option from the answer choices.
  
• Second, deciphering the connection between the clue and the empty space in the sentence can be challenging. The relationship usually is not easy to understand, and not always so apparent.
  
• Third, On our list, vocabulary knowledge is given the least priority since it's easy to overemphasize its importance. While a robust vocabulary is necessary to tackle challenging Text Completion problems, it's not the be-all and end-all.
  Many GRE Verbal problems can be solved with a limited vocabulary, but one must possess strong reading skills to even begin solving them.

All that is said above is, in a nutshell, what ETS prepares for a student when he/she takes the GRE test. The most reasonable exception that the students point out to solve the TC/SE questions is that for them, it is enough to have the vast vocabulary word knowledge to solve the questions. Here is why they got it wrong

• Knowing 2k words per se is a sterile workout. For example, it is suggested to learn words in context to retain better and faster in mind. This is an excellent strategy. However, it falls short. Not only do we need to remember specific words and their meanings but we also need to encapsulate those specific words in SPECIFIC sentences during the exam. As we know, especially in the English language, a word can have different meanings. It depends.
  
• Students seek to learn many words to fill and close the gap they have to understand the sentence and its complexity. I.E. students try to compensate for learning more words for difficulty grasping the sentence's meaning.
  
• It is true that the GRE as exam repeats itself. The words are recursive. However, knowing more words does not guarantee that some words are unknown. Every language, particularly English, is formed by the heritage of several different languages, and it is so vast that ETS could pick every possible word to insert into a sentence during the exam. Therefore, the only solution to this is, first and foremost to stress your preparation on the logic of the sentence and afterward rely on a robust vocabulary, which is quite important but is only one piece of the entire puzzle. Frequently, it will be necessary to depend on your proficiency in breaking down a sentence, recognizing subtle contextual clues, and determining the true definitions of words with various applications. Refine these abilities, and you'll observe an enhancement in your GRE Verbal score.

After an in depth analysis of all the TC/SE questions in the official material ranging from the Big Book to the Powerprep official FREE software, the questions can be categorized as the following

• Definitional or explaining the situation or scenario.
• Explaining the situation using the colon or the semicolon.
• Contrast sentence
• Sentence with Hyphens
• Balance
• Conditional sentence
• Subordinate conjuction

The common factor of the differentiation above is that it relies on specific words that denote, for example, the contrast in the sentence or the coordinate conjunction other than the verbs or else as a clue in the sentence. Yet, it is also crucial the when you read the sentence in its entirety, you can grasp NOT only the meaning but also the flow of the sentence.

For this reason, I strongly advise the students to study the following table. It is the best table that contains in it all those specific words. They will help you to understand the dichotomy of the sentence.

Here is the PDF that is also FREE. And it is the best you can find on the internet.




Here a preview. It is also great for the RC part of the test. Quote from the author to which I express my deep appreciation and gratitude for creating such an amazing tool in barely two pages



Source: https://www.smart-words.org/linking-words/






There is an important caveat before proceeding further: the strategies we will explain and the connecting words alike are not a rule set in stone. I:E even ETS tells us the word usually. This means we could have these words or a sentence with a contrast or coordinate conjunction. Perhaps the sentence does not have this at all OR we could have multiple elements simultaneously in the same question. For example , we have a definitional question but with a slight shift at the end of the same, and we notice this thanks to the word HOWEVER.

So keep in mind all the above. Stay concentrated, be flexible in your logic process, and be ready to change your strategy. It all depends on the question in from t of you.