Verbal Reasoning Section of The GRE

GRE Verbal Reasoning

• GRE Verbal Reasoning is a standardized test of vocabulary and reading comprehension.
• It is meant to evaluate your problem-solving skills not a test of subject-area knowledge.
• No need for a lot of complicated grammatical, or linguistic terminology.
• You won't have to know anything about literature, poetry, critical theory, or other language-related specialty areas.
• The structure of the test is complex, and the question types get unfamiliar and confusing, especially the vocabulary ones.

Timing and Organization

• The score on the Verbal Reasoning is your aggregate score for Verbal Reasoning sections.
• Out of five sections of GRE, two of them are Verbal Reasoning.
• Verbal Reasoning sections may come at any point during the test.
• Each Verbal Reasoning section is 30 minutes long, and contains 20 questions.
• Every GRE has one unscored section, which may be Verbal or Quantitative Reasoning.
• There's a 50-50 chance that it'll be Verbal.
• Option one: an unmarked extra section mixed in with the regular ones.
• Option two: a marked unscored section at the end.

Questions and Question Types

• There are three different question types on the Verbal Reasoning: Reading Comprehension, Text Completion, and Sentence Equivalence.
• Roughly half the questions will be Reading Comprehension, and the other half will be a combination of Text Completion and Sentence Equivalence questions.

Reading Comprehension

• This type of question measures your ability to understand and analyze reading passages.
• No specialist knowledge is necessary.

Text Completion

• Questions make you fill in one to three blanks in a group of sentences with words or phrases.

Sentence Equivalence

• Questions make you pick two possible words, that could fill in the blank in a given sentence.

Once you actually start practicing sample questions, they become a lot more intuitive.