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1,001 GRE Practice Questions For Dummies®

Visit www.dummies.com/cheatsheet/1001GRE to view this book's cheat sheet.

Introduction

Welcome to 1,001 GRE Practice Questions For Dummies. Don’t take the Dummies thing personally — you’re obviously no dummy. You made it through high school with high enough grades and test scores to get into college. You then graduated to join the elite group of approximately 30 percent of U.S. citizens who hold bachelor’s degrees, and some of you even have master’s degrees. And now you’re about to take your education further.

Between you and your goal is the GRE: a test designed solely to challenge your ability to remember everything you’ve forgotten since high school — material you haven’t touched in years. To clear this hurdle, you need some practice along with pointers of how best to answer the questions. This book provides that and more: It goes beyond providing relevant practice questions by showing simple and effective ways to solve the seemingly challenging GRE problems.

What You’ll Find

The GRE practice problems in this book are divided into six chapters: three verbal, two math, and one writing. Questions are grouped by topic. If there’s a topic that you struggle with, you’ll find a group of similar questions to practice and hone your skills. This book serves as an effective stand-alone refresher of GRE basics, or as an excellent companion to GRE For Dummies, 8th Edition, written by yours truly (with invaluable help from Joe Kraynak) and published by Wiley. Either way, this book helps you identify subject areas you need to work on so that you can practice them until you’re a pro, and thus prepare yourself for test day.

If you get a problem wrong, don’t just read the answer explanation and move on. Instead, come back to the problem and solve it again, this time avoiding the mistake that you made the first time. This is how you improve your skills and learn to solve the problems correctly and easily.

Whatever you do, stay positive. The challenging problems in this book aren’t meant to discourage you. Rather, they’re meant to show you how to solve them so that you can practice and master them.

How the Questions Are Organized

The test is divided into three main parts: verbal, math, and writing.

Verbal

The verbal questions in this book cover the following topics:

  • Sentence completion: These questions have sentences with one, two, or three words missing, and you have to select the word or words that logically complete the sentence.
  • Reading comprehension: The GRE gives you a reading passage along with two to five questions based on the passage. The questions challenge your ability to discern the purpose of the passage and the significance of the details.
  • Argument analysis: The GRE provides a short argument in the form of a passage and then asks you to select an answer that would either strengthen or weaken the argument. You may also have to define the roles of bolded sentences or select a sentence that serves a specific purpose.

Math

The math questions in this book cover the following topics:

  • Arithmetic: These questions are based on core arithmetic concepts, including prime numbers, absolute value, decimals, fractions, and ratios. Don’t be fooled by the simple nature: these questions can be as challenging as any that you find on the GRE.
  • Geometry: Geometry covers basic shapes, such as triangles, circles, and squares. These questions also go into basic 3-D shapes, including cylinders and boxes, but no prisms, spheres, or cones. The GRE sticks to its limited scope of math concepts.
  • Argument analysis: The GRE provides a short argument in the form of a passage and then asks you to select an answer that would either strengthen or weaken the argument. You may also have to define the roles of bolded sentences or select a sentence that serves a specific purpose.
  • Algebra: These questions are extensions of arithmetic, going into exponents, square roots, and numeric sequences. They also explore variations of solving for x and linear equations having x and y.
  • Word problems: No set of word problems is complete without the two trains coming from Chattanooga. These questions cover those, along with weighted averages, probability, Venn diagrams, permutations, and combinations.
  • Graphs and data interpretation: The GRE problems feature variations of median, range, and standard deviation concepts. It also asks challenging tables and graphs questions where, like the reading comprehension, you are given a set of graphs along with three questions based on those graphs.
  • Comparing quantities: About 8 of the 20 math questions in each section rehash the topics mentioned previously, but they’re in the format where you compare Quantity A to Quantity B and determine whether one is greater, they’re the same, or the relationship can’t be determined.

Writing

You are tasked with writing two different essays on the GRE, and these pages provide plenty of practice:

  • Analyze an issue essay: For your first essay, the GRE gives you an issue statement and asks you to declare and support your position on that issue. The GRE asks for your opinion, so be sure to state what you think — as long as you can support it.
  • Analyze an argument essay: For your second essay, the GRE gives you an argument that is typically flawed or incomplete. Your job is to analyze the argument and its reasoning and evidence and describe why the argument is either faulty or sound, and what information or evidence is needed to validate the argument.

Beyond the Book

Your purchase of this book gives you so much more than just several hundred problems you can work on to improve your understanding of the topics on the GRE. It also comes with a free, one'year subscription to hundreds of practice questions online. Not only can you access this digital content anytime you want, on whichever device is available to you, but you can also track your progress and view personalized reports that show you which concepts you need to study the most.

What you’ll find

The online practice that comes free with this book offers you the same questions and answers that are available here along with hundreds more. And online, they’re in a multiple-choice format. What’s great about this format is that it allows you to zero in on the details that can make or break your solution. Sometimes one (or more) of the incorrect answer options is the result of a calculation error. When you catch yourself making such a common error, you’ll know not to take the same approach with similar problems on a graded test, when the right answers really count.

Of course, the real beauty of the online problems is the ability to customize your practice. In other words, you get to choose the types of problems and the number of problems you want to tackle. The online program tracks how many questions you answer correctly versus incorrectly so you can get an immediate sense of which topics need more of your attention.

This product also comes with an online Cheat Sheet that helps you increase your odds of performing well on the GRE. Check out the free Cheat Sheet at www.dummies.com/cheatsheet/1001GRE. (No access code required. You can benefit from this info before you even register.)

How to register

To gain access to practice online, all you have to do is register. Just follow these simple steps:

  1. Register your book or ebook at Dummies.com to get your PIN. Go to www.dummies.com/go/getaccess.
  2. Select your product from the dropdown list on that page.
  3. Follow the prompts to validate your product, and then check your email for a confirmation message that includes your PIN and instructions for logging in.

If you do not receive this email within two hours, please check your spam folder before contacting us through our Technical Support website at http://support.wiley.com or by phone at 877-762-2974.

Now you’re ready to go! You can come back to the practice material as often as you want — simply log on with the username and password you created during your initial login. No need to enter the access code a second time.

Your registration is good for one year from the day you activate your PIN.

Where to Go for Additional Help

The solutions to the practice problems in this book are meant to walk you through how to get the right answers; they’re not meant to teach the material. If certain concepts are unfamiliar to you, you can find help at www.dummies.com . Just type “GRE” into the search box to turn up a wealth of GRE-related information.

If you need more detailed instruction, check out the previously referenced GRE For Dummies.

Part I

The Questions

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webextra Visit www.dummies.com for free access to great For Dummies content online.

In this part …

Become familiar with the ways the GRE asks you to read sentences and paragraphs, and brush up on the vocab that you’re likely to see. You also get to work on hundreds of math problems so that you recognize the common GRE traps and tricks. Finally, you get some practice writing the essays.

Chapter 1

Sentence Completion

Sentence Completion refers to Text Completion and Sentence Equivalence questions. Text Completion questions have one, two, or three words missing, and you choose one word for each blank. Sentence Equivalence questions have one word missing, and you choose two words for the blank.

Half the challenge is interpreting the sentence, and the other half is sorting through the vocabulary. With practice, you learn to easily interpret the sentence, and with exposure, you recognize the commonly-used GRE vocabulary words.

The Problems You’ll Work On

When working through the questions in this chapter, be prepared to

  • Look for clues in the sentence to determine its meaning.
  • Recognize irony, figures of speech, and formal diction.
  • Use transition words (“but, however, therefore”) to get the gist of the phrases.
  • Break the sentence into smaller pieces.
  • Check one word blank at a time to eliminate answer choices.

What to Watch Out For

The meaning of the sentence is not always clear, and the vocabulary can be tricky, so watch out for trap word-choice answers that

  • Appear to fit the sentence but don’t support its meaning
  • Support the meaning of the sentence but aren’t used properly
  • Appear to have one meaning but actually mean something else, such as “condone,” which means “approve”