If you wanted to meet every neighbor on your block, how would you go about it? You wouldn’t re-introduce yourself to your best friends who live a few doors down, or to the busy-body who walks her dog up and down the street all day and knows everybody’s business (no thank you!). Rather, you’d make a list of the neighbors you don’t already know and go knock on their doors. The same is true for learning GRE content. You need to identify the material that you do not yet know, and the material that’s giving you trouble, and concentrate your efforts there.

Follow the Yellow-Brick Syllabus

If you’re taking a class right now or using one of the self-study packages, then we’ve already done a lot of the hard work for you. Your syllabus tells you what material to study from week to week. However, you should also prioritize based upon your own knowledge of your strengths and weaknesses. Don’t read every last sentence or do every last practice problem if you find a particular lesson really easy. Speed up! By the same token, take extra time, and possibly seek out extra resources or practice problems, in areas where you’re struggling.

If you’re taking a class right now, then you also have a teacher, so make sure to talk to him or her if you’re having any trouble prioritizing or want some ideas about additional resources.
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Recently,we talked about how to read and take notes on a reading comprehension passage. We didn’t look at an actual example, though, so we’re going to do that today. If you haven’t already read the older article, read that first; then come back here to see the example.

The passage below is from the Manhattan Prep GRE CAT database (copyright MG Prep). If you are still using our exams and haven’t yet seen this passage, then you may want to wait until after you’ve seen the passage before you read this article.

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

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

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.

A predator is 80 meters behind its prey, which is running away at a rate of 40 kilometers per hour. If the predator chases at 48 kilometers per hour and both animals run along a straight-line path at their respective constant rates, how long will it take, in seconds, for the predator to catch the prey? (1 kilometer = 1,000 meters)

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This Valentine’s Day, Drake Martinet proposed to Stacy Green, Mashable’s Vice President of Marketing and Communications, via an infographic on Mashable.

Here’s the part of it that reminded me of a GRE problem:
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It’s always disheartening when we have a score drop, whether it happens on a practice test or (worst case scenario) on the real test. If this happens to you, the most important thing to do next is figure out why this happened. If you can figure out why, then you may be able to do something to prevent a score drop from happening again.

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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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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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