Many students have been quite confused by questions like this one:

An outspoken advocate of reform, Olympia has long worked to ________ change in what others see as an irreparably corrupt system.

Select two choices:
censure forego prompt effect impede hinder

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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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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?

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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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Credit: XKCD

To succeed at Argument Structure Passages on the GRE — short “Reading Comp” passages that are really logic problems — it helps to know a bit about the study of logic, because most mistakes in logic have been made many times before, even over thousands of years.

Many of the logical mistakes made on the GRE are really just the same logical mistakes Aristotle (the founder of the study of logic) complained about in the 4th century, B.C.

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

When writing these cards, we wanted to make sure that everyone could get something out of every card — even if you already know the word on the front. Sap is one of those strange words that hardly anyone ever thinks to look up, but that actually has far more definitions than you’d think. Check it out:

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//www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-P5RGdjICo

Watch this silent video for a new (to most of us) visual way to multiply!

What does this have to do with the GRE? Note that the 3 at right (which ended up in the ones place) was completed before any of the “big” numbers at left. That is, we didn’t need to know what our answer started with to know what our answer ended with.

Regardless of the method of multiplication you use (even if that “method” is a calculator), you will want to remember this very important principle for the GRE:
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This comic from XKCD is making a very nerdy joke:

The 70, upon opening a package, is “exploded” — into its prime factors.

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We find that there are some words that people never look up because they are “unknown unknowns” — that is, you don’t even know what you don’t know!

Did you know that even the simple word save has another meaning?
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Take a sneak peek into Manhattan Prep’s 500 Essential Words and 500 Advanced Words GRE flashcard sets!

When writing these cards, we wanted to make sure that everyone could get something out of every card — even if you already know the word on the front. So, you may know martinet, but do you know doctrinaire, hawk and the real meaning of chauvinist? Read more