Take a sneak peek into Manhattan Prep’s 500 Essential Words and 500 Advanced Words GRE flashcard sets!

Our cards have a LOT of synonyms. If you learned everything on our 1,000 flashcards, you’d certainly be learning more than 2,000 words. Check out all the words for a mixture or mishmash of things!

Try this GRE question that hinges on hodgepodge:

While the author’s first collection of short stories presented a ________ hodgepodge of voices, the second collection presents a remarkably _________ set of tales presented by a ________ narrator.

motley

variegated

homogeneous

insightful

even

facetious

lonely

disingenuous

sole

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Each week, we post a new Challenge Problem for you to attempt. If you submit the correct answer, you will be entered into that week’s drawing for two free Manhattan Prep GRE Strategy Guides.

The sequence of numbers a₁, a₂, a₃, …, a_n, … is defined by  for each integer n â‰¥ 1.

Quantity A
The sum of the first 20 terms of this sequence

Quantity B
The sum of the first 19 terms of this sequence

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When we study practice problems, our overall goal is to master the problem we’re working on right now. What does mastery mean? It means that, when we see a future different practice problem that tests the same thing as this current practice problem, we will realize that the future problem has certain things in common with this current problem, and we will know what steps to take as a result—we will, literally, recognize what to do on the future different practice problem, a problem we’ve never actually seen before.

It’s necessary to get to this level of mastery because the problems we study will never be the actual problems we’re expected to do on the test. But we will see similar problems—problems that have something in common with problems that we’ve already studied. If we can recognize what to do, then we will be faster (which is always important on this test), and we will be more effective—we’ll be more likely to get it right because we’ll know that the method we’re using actually worked the last time we saw a similar practice problem.

This mastery we’re talking about—the ability to recognize what to do on a new, different-but-similar problem—comes from the analysis we do after we’ve already finished trying a new practice problem for the first time. So how do we do that?

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Each week, we post a new Challenge Problem for you to attempt. If you submit the correct answer, you will be entered into that week’s drawing for two free Manhattan Prep GRE Strategy Guides.

In a school of x students, 36 are in the honors program, and x% of the 35 female students are in the honors program. If 15 male students are in the honors program, what fraction of all the non-honors students are female?

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One of the highly touted features of the Revised GRE is the ability of students to navigate freely within a test section. While the old GRE was (and the GMAT is) a Computer Adaptive Test, which required students to complete the test without skipping a question, the Revised GRE is a Section Adaptive Test, which allows students to skip questions and analyze the overall section on a review screen. But, as great as this feature sounds, you shouldn’t skip around. On the GRE, time is extremely valuable. Time spent hunting for an easy question is time wasted.

That is not to say the review screen isn’t a boon; it can be. Pacing is an extremely important part of GRE strategy, and the review screen can help you with that.

By test day, you should have an idea of how much time you will spend on each question. Here are some good guidelines for how much time you can afford on each problem type: Read more

A few months ago, the New York Times published an interesting article: Forget What You Know About Good Study Habits. (Click on the title to read the original article.) We’ve been discussing it here at Manhattan GRE and I wanted to share this discussion with you.

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Take a sneak peek into Manhattan Prep’s 500 Essential Words and 500 Advanced Words GRE flashcard sets!

You know what we’ve noticed? There are all kinds of words that people don’t know, but rarely look up, because those words aren’t “vocabulary words.” Hmmn. Actually, those words — generally conjunctions, prepositions, and adverbs — tend to be pivotal in understanding the meaning of a sentence! Check out just one of the kinds of words we’re talking about:

Are you clear on moreover, nonetheless, incidentally, whence, whereas, notwithstanding, via, apropos, per, and ergo?

Want to adopt 1,000 new flashcards? Visit our store here.

Here at Manhattan GRE, we receive a lot of Grad School jokes, most of which are fairly lackluster.  However, we recently came across this LCD Soundsystem parody video, Grad School, I Love You (But You’re Bringing Me Down).  Something about this video drew us in, so we decided to share it with you.

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Mnemonics or mnemonic devices are memory tricks to help us remember things like vocabulary words (here’s a post about the word mnemonic).

However, many mnemonics are pretty cheesy — often involving the kind of jokes some people call “groaners.” For instance…

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How to read? Surely, we all know how to read already! Right?

It turns out that the best way to read a passage on a standardized test is not the best way to read in the real world. So before I say anything else, I want to say this: use what we’re about to discuss for the GRE only. Don’t read this way once you actually get to grad school!
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