Handling GRE Questions With Unfamiliar Vocabulary

October 06, 2008

We've all been a situation where we faced an analogy, antonym, or sentence completion where we didn't know all or some of the words. Sometimes, you just have to guess and move on.

However, there are some skills you can develop to give yourself a better chance of answering those questions correctly.

Use Roots

Knowing roots can help you dissect really hard words. If you’ve studied Latin or other Romance languages such as French or Spanish, you already know many of these roots. Prefixes and suffixes are shared across many languages as well. When in doubt about a word, see if you can break it down into component pieces to give yourself a rough understanding of the word’s meaning.

Think Positive...and Negative

If all else fails, you can do that trick you did as a kid – guess whether the word is positive or negative. Did you know that this is how we learned words when we didn’t know them?

If someone called us something nasty on the playground, we could readily infer its derisive quality. We then took it home and asked our parents what the word meant.

How many times did we ask our parents what certain positive words meant? Well, probably not as often as we asked about the negative ones. We were much more intrigued by the latter.

If you can guess on test day that a word is negative, you can then realize that its opposite will be positive, and you can eliminate from the choices anything neutral or negative.

Manage Your Time

You and I both know that staring at an unfamiliar word for minutes on end is not a useful tactic. The definitions of words do not suddenly reveal themselves to us. Spending too much time on a particular word might mean you won’t have enough time to properly tackle the three reading comp passages you'll have on the test. A strategic guess (50/50 shot) in the proper timeframe is much more valuable than a right answer using an exorbitant amount of time.

The more time you spend on questions you don't know, the less time you'll have to complete the questions that you do know!

Keep Each Question in Perspective

It's easy to lose your concentration or get down on yourself when faced with unfamiliar vocabulary. But remember: You are only seeing these impossibly hard words because you are doing well. You can get plenty of questions wrong and still get a great score, so don’t panic! Instead, tell yourself that your goal is to eliminate choices such that you can make a strategic guess. Remember, you worked really hard to get here. Don’t blow it.

The GRE will be uncomfortable. Prepare yourself. You will probably be working at or above your level for most of the test. For some questions, handling words you don't know turns out to be just as important as dealing with the ones you do.

Jeff Sackmann is a test-prep tutor based in New York City and the author of Total GRE Math, among other GRE and GMAT resources.

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