Articles published in Math

GRE Word Problems: Favorite Tricks and Traps

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Manhattan Prep GRE Blog - GRE Word Problems: Favorite Tricks and Traps by Chelsey Cooley

You can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GRE courses absolutely free. Crazy, right? Check out our upcoming courses here.


The GRE is a fair test. GRE word problems will always give you enough info to turn the words into the right equations. However, that doesn’t mean they’ll make the translation easy or obvious! To make tough GRE word problems tougher, the test writers use certain words and phrases that they know are frequently misinterpreted. This makes you more likely to write down the incorrect equations and more likely to get the problem wrong. Read more

GRE Math for People Who Hate Math: Remainder Problems

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Manhattan Prep GRE Blog - GRE Math for People Who Hate Math: Remainder Problems by Chelsey Cooley

You can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GRE courses absolutely free. Crazy, right? Check out our upcoming courses here.


The secret to understanding GRE remainder problems is in the word remainder itself. Suppose you bake a dozen brownies, and while you’re at work, your roommate eats ten of them. The two brownies left over are the remainder of the batch. The mathematical term remainder refers to the same thing: what’s left over after something is taken away. Read more

Play to Your Strengths on the GRE

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Manhattan Prep GRE Blog - Play to Your Strengths on the GRE by Cat Powell

You can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GRE courses absolutely free. Ready to take the plunge? Check out our upcoming courses here.


In the first class of our GRE curriculum, we begin by talking about growth mindset vs. fixed mindset. If we approach a new task with a fixed mindset—i.e. I am or am not good at this—we’re a lot less likely to improve at it. When we believe instead that we can and will improve if we work hard, we get better faster. The stories we tell ourselves about our abilities shape what we’re actually able to accomplish. Read more

Introducing the GRE Just Math™ Course

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Manhattan Prep GRE Blog - Introducing the GRE Just Math Course by Manhattan Prep

You just need to learn GRE Math. Maybe you haven’t taken math since high school and just need a respectable Quant score to get into your target school. Or maybe you’re already pretty good at math, but your target school requires you to be great. No matter your starting point or goal score, we built GRE Just Math to get you where you need to be on the Math section of the GRE. Read more

Learn GRE® Math in a Day (or two)

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Manhattan Prep GRE Blog - Learn GRE Math in a Day by Manhattan Prep

Need to crush the GRE to get into your dream grad program, but haven’t taken a math class since high school? Is algebra a foreign language to you? Does the mere thought of doing math trigger deep-seated trauma? Or maybe you’re not allergic to math, but your skills are rusty and you could use a thorough refresher. Perhaps you’re actually quite confident in your math abilities, but you want expert instruction to reach the highest level as quickly as possible.

We developed our Foundations of GRE Math workshop for anyone who wants to gain all the fundamentals of GRE math content and strategy as efficiently as possible—just one day, to be exact. Read more

Study Like an Athlete: What Competitive Running Taught Me about the GRE

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Manhattan Prep GRE Blog - Study Like an Athlete: What Competitive Running Taught Me about the GRE by Tom Anderson

You can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GRE courses absolutely free. Crazy, right? Check out our upcoming courses here.


Study Like an Athlete

The GRE is not just any other exam. The Quant section contains questions you ostensibly learned how to do in fourth grade—some of them on topics like even numbers and factor trees. Underneath that elementary veneer, though, there are often some challenging inferences you have to make. The GRE Verbal section also tests you on reading and processing an incredible swath of information: passages cover every topic from pre-industrial leisure practices to radiation patterns in the Crab Nebula. Because of this breadth of content and the quirky questions asked about that content, the GRE is an exam you should practice for rather than just study for. Think of it more like a performance and less like a test. Read more

Mental Math Magic (Part 2)

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Manhattan Prep GRE Blog - Mental Math Magic (Part 2) by Neil Thornton

You can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GRE courses absolutely free. Ready to take the plunge? Check out our upcoming courses here.


In my last article, I gave you some time-saving basic arithmetic to memorize and a few tools to calculate more efficiently, using a combination of your brain and your scratch paper.

Today I’m going to throw few fun mental math “tricks” your way. Again, you could always pop out your calculator or do long division and multiplication on your scratch paper, but learning to multiply numbers in your head can be a massive time saver, as well as a good way to double-check what you do put into the calculator. Read more

How to Solve Any GRE Word Problem (Really)

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Manhattan Prep GRE Blog - How to Solve Any GRE Word Problem (Really) by Chelsey Cooley

You can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GRE courses absolutely free. Crazy, right? Check out our upcoming courses here.


Word problems get a lot of hate from students. When you read the explanation for a tough GRE word problem, it’s easy to feel like the solution came out of nowhere. Maybe it makes sense now, but how were you supposed to figure it out on your own?

Fortunately, word problems really aren’t so bad—they’re just misunderstood. There’s a strategy for solving GRE word problems, just as there is for any other type of GRE Quant problem. Here’s a way to confidently solve any GRE word problem. Read more

GRE Math for People Who Hate Math: Average Speed

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Manhattan Prep GRE Blog - GRE Math for People Who Hate Math: Average Speed by Chelsey Cooley

You can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GRE courses absolutely free. Crazy, right? Check out our upcoming courses here.


On the GRE, you will never, ever, ever, ever have to average two speeds together. If a GRE Quant problem gives you two speeds (say, 40 mph and 60 mph), and you average them (ending up with 50 mph), you’ve just gotten that problem wrong. Read more

Mental Math Magic

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Manhattan Prep GRE Blog - Mental Math Magic by Neil Thornton

You can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GRE courses absolutely free. Ready to take the plunge? Check out our upcoming courses here.


Quick!
What is 12 x 9?
What is 9³?
What is the square root of 196?
What is 95 – 37? Read more