What’s the Reading Comprehension section all about?

What’s the Reading Comprehension section all about?

The test makers often purposefully fill the passages with jargon and complex vocabulary. For an untrained test taker, it would take a lot of time to comprehend such passages. Because we usually read essays to retain information and details, while on the GRE, reading that way will get you bogged down and confused with unnecessary information. So you have to learn how to read to ace the GRE.

On the GRE, you can expect about five passages per section and these passages will have 1-5 questions each, for a total of ten Reading Comprehension questions per section. These passages will vary from 1 – 5 paragraphs in length.

Now, where do they get these passages from? The GRE passages can be academic or non-academic and are drawn from books, magazines, biographies, work of literature, scholarly journals and text books. The topics include social science, natural science, humanities, arts, politics and everyday life issues, too. The passages mimic the material you’ll be reading in grad school, with advanced vocabulary, complex sentence structure, and complicated ideas.

There are 3 types of questions you’ll have to answer on the reading comprehension:

• Multiple-choice Questions; Choose 1 answer: These are your average, multiple choice questions with 5 answer choices out of which you must select ONLY ONE answer choice. You should read all the answer choices before selecting any choice.
• Multiple-choice Questions; Choose 1 or more answers: Here, you’ll have 3 answer choices, and you’ll have to choose every correct answer, which could be one, two or all three of them. No partial credit is awarded, either! Keep in mind that these answer choices need to evaluated separately.
• Select-in-Passage: This is a totally new sub question type, unique to the GRE. You’ll have to click on a sentence in the passage that answers the question.

So far so good. Now, let’s take a look at an example sentence extracted from the Official Guide:

“I enjoyed ‘A Dream of Light and Shadow: Portraits of Latin American Women Writers’ for the same reasons that, as a child, I avidly consumed women’s biographies: the fascination with how the biographical details of another female’s life are represented and interpreted.”

Does this sound super difficult to comprehend? Are you stuck? Well, this is just one single sentence and there will be a many sentences like this in a single passage, on the test.

The real challenge for you will be to read the sentences quickly and yet understand the passage structure and process the information in them so you will be able to answer the questions that follow. Remember, you are not reading the passage to know about the biographical details of a woman’s life or how Galileo invented the telescope. You are reading the passage only to answer the questions and once you have answered the questions, you don’t have to remember any part of the passage. So, avoid reading to retain the information.