How GRE structures a Text Completion question?
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30 Jul 2014, 03:14
Lets try to answer this following text completion question
Amongst her friends she was the most, ____________.
A) selective
B) sociable
C) churlish
D) inhibited
E) satisfied
So, what should I do? Well, I should try to come up with a word here that goes in the blank. So, come up with the word for the blank. Well, her friends are kind of boring, I'm guessing, so she was the most fun.
Well, maybe her friends were actually the fun ones, and she was the most boring. Perhaps, it has nothing to do with fun or boring. Maybe she's just really sad, or wait a second.
I could go on forever because she could be anything. That is, any word could go in the blank, and this is not a text completion. This is not a GRE question at all.
So, gone. Why? Well, GRE text completions will always have a part of the sentence that tells you what the blank is about.
So a GRE question will look like the following-
Amongst her friends she was the most _____________, often walking over to a group of people she had never met before and introducing herself.
A) selective
B) sociable
C) churlish
D) inhibited
E) satisfied
So, we've read now the entire sentence, and we're going to come up with our own word here, once we have found what I call the clue. And the clue is the part of the sentence, it could be a word, it could be a phrase, that tells us about the blank, and I'm underlying the parts that are important.
She have never talked to these people before, but yet, she would go up to a group of people, and she would introduce herself. Wow, what sort of person would that be? Well, you're going to have to come up with your own word.
Yes. You do not want to go down to the answer choices. Herein these words are the trap, or herein lies the traps because if you do not think through a sentence yourself, and you simply start plugging in the answers into the blank, you could convince yourself of quite a lot of things, and that's why we come up with our own word for the blank.
And so, we know she is likely to go up to anyone and introduce herself. So, she is the most friendly. Maybe your word is outgoing. It doesn't matter. As long as you come up with one word, and then you match that word with the answer choices.
So, let's start with A, selective. If you're friendly, by definition, are you selective? No. If you're friendly, if you're outgoing, are you social? Yes, those words are synonyms, and there, we have an answer, but it's a good idea to look at the other words.
What does churlish mean? Well, maybe you don't know. What does inhibited mean? Inhibited is a little bit more common of a word than churlish. Inhibited means that you're shy. We know she's anything but shy, and then we have satisfied.
You could be friendly, but you're not necessarily satisfied. The two words don't quite relate. Sociable works perfectly, and there is our answer. Churlish, by the way, the difficult word here isn't necessarily the answer because we've already found an answer.
Churlish means rude and ill mannered. It doesn't work here, but we've followed these basic steps. Again, read the entire sentence. Find the clue. Those are these keywords or phrases that tell you what the blank is about.
Then, you come up with your own word, and you match that word with the answer choices. So, those are the important basic steps for you to follow, and these strategies apply to two-blank and three-blank text completions as well.