With most grad school applications due sometime between December and January, we hear about a lot of students who have to take the GRE soon after Thanksgiving weekend. I’m sure that a number of you reading this will have to spend your precious holiday break poring over GRE practice materials, only breaking to pour gravy over your Thanksgiving feast.

WARNING: Do not confuse poring with pouring

To help you with your studies we have come up with the three key tips for holiday studying (four if you count the sagacious caption above).

1.) Read the Recipes Aloud to the Chef

This is not just a ploy to force you to help in the kitchen, we swear. If you are lucky enough to have someone cooking for you, and they don’t mind having another body in their kitchen during prep time, offer to help read them the recipes they are using and to help measure out ingredients. A lot of the GRE word problems involve skills that are similar to recipe reading (manipulating numbers that are pulled out of a passage of text). Also, the simple numbers involved in recipe measurements are similar to the simple arithmetic that many GRE quant problems demand. The time spent adding, subtracting, and measuring food will help you hone your speed and comfort with simple calculations for the GRE.
GRE Quant? No big deal.

2.) Study Early on Thanksgiving

In a previous post we talked about how diet can impact your ability to retain information. While a Thanksgiving splurge isn’t going to derail your study ability long term, people often spend Thanksgiving consuming large amounts of food and possibly imbibing some alcohol. Whatever your holiday routine, you are probably going to be more able to study on Thanksgiving morning than you will be after your sixth slice of pumpkin pie. Instead of watching the Thanksgiving Day Parade, try to fit in your studying early so that you can spend the afternoon stuffing yourself with yams.

3.) Don’t Overdo It

The key to successful holiday studies might just be to take it easy. Studying on the holidays is a good idea, but we’d suggest that you try to follow your normal study patterns. Just as taking a few days off for the holidays would be a waste of study time, using the time off to cram could burn you out. Try to pretend that the holiday break is just a normal weekend, and study accordingly. I know that Thanksgiving is usually not a time for moderation, but try to allow your even-keeled study habits to act as a temperate middle ground between for your gluttonous eating and your post-feast state of torpor.

Pictured: the antonym of moderation

In closing, we advise that you do some studying in the morning, then help measure out flour in the kitchen, and after that, leave your books alone for the rest of the day. After all, the Cowboys are playing the Dolphins this Thanksgiving, and we all know that one of the most important lessons ever taught on Thanksgiving was when Leon Lett showed us all that it is sometimes best to just leave it alone.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

We recently read a great article over at Gradhacker titled: Gaming Grad School. This article analyzes the question that plagues us all: why do we find it so easy to spend 14 straight hours launching plasma grenades at aliens (or birds at pigs, or batarangs at clowns, or Tetris blocks at other Tetris blocks), but so hard to spend the same amount of time on our studies?

Read more

This article from the Wall Street Journal analyzes the best and worst conditions in which you can study for tests, which got us thinking about how study practices can impact test scores. It makes sense that certain environmental factors can be detrimental to your studies. In college, I always found it difficult to study during neighbor’s marathon dubstep spinning sessions. Right now, I am writing this post in between bites of falafel, while listening to Super Bass on repeat, after I night where I lost about 4 hours of sleep in order to stay up and play Batman: Arkham City “ clearly, I am in no state to be studying for a test. But common sense alone won’t provide you with the perfect study setup.

I know many of you don’t want to tear yourselves away from your GRE flashcards for long enough to read that link, so here are the highlights.

Food

Your brain, like most of your other vital organs, needs nutrients to run. During the GRE, your brain will be running a marathon, so you need to carbo-load for your mind “ and not just on test day. The Wall Street Journal suggests that for a full week before the test you should stop freebasing pixie stix (our advice, not theirs) and instead eat a diet of high-carb, high-fiber, slow digesting foods like oatmeal. Keep an eye out for a post, coming to our blog soon, with a full analysis of the role food and nutrition play in test taking.

Music

Turn the stereo off while studying. Years of baby Mozart and Tom Lehrer have taught us the joys of musical learning. But, while listening to GWAR’s greatest hits might make you more relaxed, it will also make it harder for you to remember everything that you review. I can personally attest to this; my GRE scores improved dramatically when I started practice testing under real conditions without music. I used to run my vocab lists while listening to music, but I had a lot of difficult keeping lyrics out of my head when I was trying to commit definitions to memory. Also, I had a lot of trouble pacing myself on practice tests when I was listening to tunes I think music does strange things to the space time continuum.

Sleep

It is a given that you should get plenty of sleep on the night before the test, but you should also try to line up your study schedule so that you are learning right before you go to bed. The things that you think about right before you go to sleep are easier to recall later on.

Practice

Studying helps, but only if you are actively learning. Don’t just read through your flashcards, actually test yourself to recall the information before you flip a card over and check yourself. Repetition helps too.

These tips will help you maximize the benefit of your studies, but you still need to put in the hours. Oatmeal alone will not allow you to ace the GRE. When it comes right down to it, you have to learn the material. Now stop reading this and go run your flashcards one more time.

The word harrow has two definitions:
1. To break up and level (soil or land) with a harrow.
2. To inflict great distress or torment on.

We often refer to a dangerous or stressful incident as a “harrowing experience.”

As for the literal meaning, though — harrow is both the action of breaking up ground and the tool used to do it — I think that for years I had mistakenly been picturing a hoe.

Actually, a harrow is this terrifying web of spikes:

(Hey, we’re Manhattan Prep — what do we know about farming?)

So, a harrowing experience makes you feel as though someone dragged that over you! Yikes.

A similarly horrifying metaphor is found in the word excoriate, which we use to mean “to criticize harshly,” but which literally means “to run so hard as to wear the skin off of.” You could certainly excoriate someone with a harrow.

Also, here’s something interesting — the use of harrow as a metaphor is first attributed to Shakespeare, in Hamlet:

I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres.

Harrow is also related to the verb harry:
1. To disturb or distress by or as if by repeated attacks; harass. See Synonyms at harass.
2. To raid, as in war; sack or pillage.

According to Etymonline, harry comes from the Old English hergian (“make war, lay waste, ravage, plunder”), the word used in the “Anglo-Saxon Chronicle” for what the Vikings did to England. So, when you say that you’re feeling harried due to all your responsibilities, you’re probably exaggerating a bit.

You can get a harrow like this one here.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this post, and that we here at Manhattan Prep are making the GRE a less harrowing experience for you.

Ever wish there was a more convenient way to take advantage of your morning train ride or doctor’s office waiting room session to get that nagging GRE® study out of the way? If you answered a resounding “yes!” to that question, then your wish has been granted. Read more

Minatory means “menacing or threatening.” Bullies are minatory. An approaching tornado could be minatory. You know what else is minatory? The Minotaur!

Abridged from Wikipedia:

In Greek mythology, the Minotaur, as the Greeks imagined him, was a creature with the head of a bull on the body of a man or, as described by Roman poet Ovid, “part man and part bull”. He dwelt at the center of the Cretan Labyrinth, which was an elaborate maze-like construction built to hold the Minotaur. The Minotaur was eventually killed by the Athenian hero Theseus.

It turns out that minatory and Minotaur don’t actually share a common root (minatory shares a root with menace and Minotaur comes from Minos, king of Crete, and tauros, “bull.”)

But, if it helps us remember that minatory means threatening, then I think it’s a pretty helpful association. I mean, look at this:

Really minatory!

Happily, the world didn’t end this weekend! History did not reach its terminus, and we were not extirpated! (Also, I just want to say: I’m writing this post in advance.)

In honor of dubious prophesies, we have a memory trick submitted by Manhattan GRE Guided Self-Study student Susanne, for the word nostrum, which means “a medicine sold with false or exaggerated claims and with no demonstrable value; quack medicine; a scheme, theory, device, etc., especially one to remedy social or political ills.” (Note that in American English, scheme has a negative connotation.) From Susanne:

How do I remember the word NOSTRUM, you ask? I think of Nostradamus, who is renowned for his book of prophecies. But, did you know that Nostradamus was also an apothecary? If you are one (like me) to think that his prophecies are all wack and that he’s just a quack, how could you, then, trust the medicine he made? Well, I would think that his medicine is also quack, so when I need to recall the meaning of the word NOSTRUM, I simply think of this little formula: medicine from Nostradamus = NOSTRUM.

Thanks, Susanne!

Manhattan GRE has developed 6 full-length GRE computer adaptive tests and is giving one away for free. Obviously, after massively augmenting your lexicon from its formerly pedestrian status to its currently redoubtable one, you will want to get a score on that thing.

After the practice test, you’ll see a results area that will not only give you a score (actually, a score for quant and a score for verbal, with percentiles), but also:

• A rundown of all the problems you did
• Your answer to each problem and the correct answer
• Explanations for each problem
• The difficulty level of each problem
• The amount of time you spent on each problem
• The cumulative time you spent over the course of the test versus the target cumulative time at various junctures during the test

If you take additional practice tests (you can also purchase access to all six exams here for $30, or get access to them by purchasing Manhattan GRE’s books or taking a class), you will be able to run assessment reports that will break down — among other useful statistics — what percent of problems you are getting correct or incorrect in specific areas such as Triangles, Exponents, Inference Questions in Reading Comp, etc.

Go here to take the free practice test.

Welcome to the Manhattan GRE blog!  We hope you’ll come back daily, making us your diurnal (or perhaps preprandial, or postprandial, or matutinal) lexical stopover!

Since vocabulary is the pith, the crux, the marrow, the essentia of the GRE verbal section, every day we’ll post a GRE word, or several words clustered around a theme, in a way that relates to current events, pop culture, or the other aspects of the world around us.

Some experts say that you need to hear, read, or use a word 7 times to really know it. Other experts give different numbers, but the crux is: the more you interact with a word, and the more different ways in which you interact with that word, the better. Therefore, we’ll use a variety of media for greater mnemonic efficacy!

Are you ready to exigently augment your vocabulary? Let us commence!