Target Test Prep Representative
Joined: 12 Sep 2018
Status:Founder & CEO, Target Test Prep
Affiliations: Target Test Prep
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Re: how to boost my verbal abilities ?
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29 Sep 2018, 18:09
Hi mestafanous2,
I'm glad you reached out, and I'm happy to help. Regarding the best GRE resources, check out the reviews here on GRE prep club. That being said, since you are looking for verbal reosources, I'm happy to provide some advice of how to improve your verbal score.
As I’m sure you know, as your vocabulary improves, your GRE verbal score very likely will improve. With that said, vocabulary on the GRE is a beast, and learning such a vast number of GRE vocab words will take many hours. Thus, you will want to find a large, reputable vocab list and study the heck out of it. Yes, the process of memorizing thousands of words is tedious and boring, but if your competition is memorizing 2,000 to 3,000 vocab words, then you must do the same or more! However, memorizing vocab words is half the battle. After improving your vocab, you need to improve your skills at answering Text Completion and Sentence Equivalence questions.
When answering a Text Completion question, you need to not only select the correct vocab word for each sentence but also focus on relationships between sentences. By understanding how each sentence relates the next (or the previous), you will be able to better determine the appropriate word that fits in each blank. In other words, don’t get too bogged down in the details, and be sure to focus on the BIG PICTURE.
Likewise when answering Sentence Equivalence questions, focus on the BIG PICTURE or context clues that are provided in the sentence. If you can accurately assess the context of what you are reading, you will have a better shot at selecting the appropriate vocab word to complete the sentence.
While a strong vocabulary will greatly help improve your verbal score, you must also improve your Reading Comprehension skills. Reading
When practicing Reading Comprehension, you need to develop a reading strategy that is both efficient and thorough. Reading too fast and not understanding what you have read are equally as harmful as reading too slow and using up too much time. When attacking Reading Comprehension passages, you must have one clear goal in mind: to understand the context of what you are reading. However, you must do so efficiently, so you need to avoid getting bogged down in the details of each paragraph and focus on understanding the main point of each paragraph. That being said, do not fall into the trap of thinking that you can just read the intro and the conclusion and comprehend the main idea of a paragraph. As you read a paragraph, consider how the context of the paragraph relates to previous paragraphs, so you can continue developing your overall understanding of the passage. Furthermore, as you practice Reading Comprehension, focus on the exact types of questions with which you struggle: Find the Main idea, Inference, Author’s Tone, etc. Analyze your incorrect answers to better determine why you tend to get a particular question type wrong, and then improve upon your weaknesses.
You can perfect your reading strategy with a lot of practice. However, keep in mind that GRE Reading Comprehension passages are not meant to be easy to read, so to better prepare yourself to tackle such passages, read magazines with similar content and style, such as the Economist, Scientific American, and Smithsonian.