GRE and Ball State University

[goth_kittykat]

hello everyone.

i am currently studying to take the gre before they change the format in august.  this is my first time studying and taking it and i am using the kaplan gre premier 2011 book to study.  i got to the analogy section and realized i am really bad at those! partly because i don't know some of the words in the examples given(which i am

Comments

[roseofjuly]

I used Barron's 3500 word list, and made flash cards of the ones I didn't know. Practically every word that showed up on the test was on that list. I have a large vocabulary but the analogies were the second most difficult for me (after antonyms) because of the lack of context. I honestly didn't like Kaplan's words - I used their book to prepare, too, and I felt like their word list was far too easy and didn't 1) show some of the more difficult GRE words and 2) didn't give second and third meanings. One of the difficult analogy questions I distinctly remember used some obscure third meaning of a common word. If you didn't know the third meaning, none of the answer choices made sense.

I've tutored the GRE and SAT and I've read a bunch of prep books, and I honestly don't know any other strategy to use in the analogies section. What I did when I was studying for the analogies section was I started out broad and came in narrow. The analogies section has something like 6-8 relationships (you know, category/member, big/small, tool/function, whatever). So I would make a bridge sentence that was really broad, see what that eliminated, and then I would try to see what applied to one of the questions that didn't to the others.

For this example:

AVIARY : BIRDS

(A) den : lions
(B) coop : chickens
(C) school : fish
(D) desert : camel
(E) garden : weeds

An aviary is something that holds birds, broadly speaking. But all of the answer choices are something that holds : something. So my next step was, what specifically is an aviary to birds that the other answers are not? It's a place where people deliberately put birds to hold them. That eliminates everything else, because we don't put lions in dens, fish in schools, camels in deserts, or weeds in gardens. (This one was an easy one from this website: http://www.majortests.com/gre/analogy.php. They have some hard questions on there.)

It takes more time to do it that way, but I deliberately sped up my reaction time in the other questions (reading comprehension and sentence completion) so I could have more time for analogies and antonyms. (Antonyms are a bitch - there's absolutely NO context, you just have to know the word.)

I also used number2.com to practice the questions. Honestly, the only way to get better at the questions is just to practice them over and over, and then look at why you got the ones you got wrong wrong. I like Number2.com because they explain the answers to you, which is more important than just doing it. As you realize how your thinking went awry, you refine your method for getting to the correct answer.

[erat_in_fatis]

Thank you, this was not my post but your answer was very thorough and helpful, especially with all of the links.