Lesson: Building your Vocabulary

Comment on Building your Vocabulary

Ain't nobody got time for that!
greenlight-admin's picture

Ha!

Are the two groups of wordlists drawn from the GRE Official book?
greenlight-admin's picture

Good question. They're drawn from several different Official GRE questions (various official GRE books and retired test questions)

please compile the remaining 199000 English words.
greenlight-admin's picture

:-)

Hi Brent, Basically I'm not from a native English speaking background. I'm little worried of the this module. Tried many ways to learn, memorise vocab but interest didn't lasted for longer period. Now this download PDF method looks good and promising. My question is- is that 1000 words all together is good enough for scoring an above average score? not a higher grade though?
please reply me.
thanks
vineet
greenlight-admin's picture

I'm not sure you mean by "... scoring an above average score? not a higher grade though?"

The 1000 words should be sufficient to answer most GRE verbal questions. Of course, the GRE verbal sections don't just test your vocabulary. So, just knowing all of the definitions doesn't guarantee that you'll answer every question correctly, since you also need to interpret the contextual information in order to determine what kind of word will fit in the blank.

Cheers,
Brent

Would you say that memorizing these 1000 words would greatly help increase the chances of achieving a 160+ verbal score?
greenlight-admin's picture

Yes, definitely.
Of course, in addition to possessing a strong vocabulary, you must be good at using contextual clues to predict the nature of the missing word(s).

Cheers,
Brent

Hi Brent,

Are the words "puissance" and "militate" some how considered synonyms ? in the sense that they both mean having an influence, or that doesn't hold true ?

Thank you.
greenlight-admin's picture

PUISSANCE: Power to influence or coerce
The the president pledged to put the full PUISSANCE of the nation into the war effort
Synonyms: ENERGY, POWER, STRENGTH

MILITATE: Have force or influence (to have a substantial effect)
His prison record MILITATED against him.
Synonym: HAVE AN EFFECT ON

The two words are kind of similar in that INFLUENCE is involved.
The big difference is that MILITATE is a verb and PUISSANCE is a noun.
So, in that regard, they really can't be considered synonymous.

I see! thanks Brent.

When you say average verbal GRE score, how much we talking.
greenlight-admin's picture

Good question!
By "average," I mean scores near the 50th percentile.
Something in the V148 to V154 range.

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