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. Virtual is a pretty simple word, but how about nomimal or de facto? Check it out:

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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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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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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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As a Manhattan GRE employee I tend to see GRE vocabulary everywhere.  When I’m reading a book, or watching TV, or listening to music, GRE vocabulary words just jump out at me.  It is sort of like in the movie They Live when Rowdy Roddy Piper puts on his magic sunglasses and suddenly all of the writing in advertisements is changed to the word OBEY… except for me everything would be saying ACCEDE.

Just last night, during the Republican Presidential Debate in Arizona, I heard the candidates use a few great GRE vocabulary words.  While politicians will often use simple language in an attempt to reach the broadest possible segment of the electorate, last night’s candidates didn’t hesitate to throw in a few obscure talking points.

At different points in last night’s debate, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum each used the word feckless.  Here is Romney’s quote:

Romney: We have very bad news that’s come from the Middle East over the past several months, a lot of it in part because of the feckless leadership of our President.

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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:

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

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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