GRE Verbal section constitutes three question types. One of these is reading comprehension, and the other two are text completion and sentence equivalence. The objective of GRE verbal section is to gauge your aptitude for grad school. Hence, the test contents are designed to test how well you can understand and interpret complex passages. These passages are dense with high-level vocabulary, linking words and phrases, and complicated sentence structures.

This article will focus on Reading comprehension and give you five tips to improve your performance.

What is reading comprehension question?

Reading comprehension questions always involve a passage that you have to read to answer the questions. Depending on the question, this can either be a long passage or a short one. The questions are designed to test your ability to read, comprehend, and analyze dense, graduate-level passages.

Typically, how many reading comprehension questions are in a section?

A verbal section contains 20 questions. About half of these would be reading comprehension questions.

Specifically, what do reading comprehension questions test?

Reading comprehension questions test a variety of different abilities. These abilities, as stated on ETS’s website, are:

• understanding the meaning of individual words and sentences
• understanding the meaning of paragraphs and larger bodies of text
• distinguishing between minor and major points
• summarizing a passage
• drawing conclusions from the information provided
• reasoning from incomplete data to infer missing information
• understanding the structure of a text in terms of how the parts relate to one another
• identifying the author’s assumptions and perspective
• analyzing a text and reaching conclusions about it
• identifying strengths and weaknesses of a position
• developing and considering alternative explanations

What areas are the passages taken from?

Reading comprehension questions are generally taken from the following three areas.

• Humanities
• Social sciences (including business)
• Natural sciences

What does a reading comprehension question look like?

Although reading comprehension is a category of its own in the verbal section, these questions come in three distinct forms.

I will use the same passage as an example for all three question types. Only the questions will be different. Here is the passage:

Reviving the practice of using elements of popular music in classical composition, an approach that had been in hibernation in the United States during the 1960s, composer Philip Glass (born 1937) embraced the ethos of popular music in his compositions. Glass based two symphonies on music by rock musicians David Bowie and Brian Eno. Still, the symphonies’ sound is distinctively his. Popular elements do not appear out of place in Glass’s classical music, which has shared certain harmonies and rhythms with rock music from its early days. Yet this use of popular elements has not made Glass a composer of popular music. His music is not a version of popular music packaged to attract classical listeners; it is high art for listeners steeped in rock rather than the classics.

Multiple choice (select one answer choice)

This is the most basic form of a reading comprehension question. You read a passage and then select one answer from five answer choices. This type of reading comprehension question makes up the majority of RC questions on GRE.

Example: Select only one answer choice.

The passage addresses which of the following issues related to Glass’s use of popular elements in his classical compositions?

1. How it is regarded by listeners who prefer rock to the classics
2. How it has affected the commercial success of Glass’s music
3. Whether it has contributed to a revival of interest among other composers in using popular elements in their compositions
4. Whether it has had a detrimental effect on Glass’s reputation as a composer of classical music
5. Whether it has caused certain of Glass’s works to be derivative in quality

Multiple choice (select one or more answer choices)

This form of RC question will have three answer choices. You may have to choose one or more correct answers. You will get no partial credit, and you have to select all the correct answers.

Example: Consider each of the three choices separately and select all that apply.

The passage suggests that Glass’s work displays which of the following qualities?

1. A return to the use of popular music in classical compositions
2. An attempt to elevate rock music to an artistic status more closely approximating that of classical music
3. A long-standing tendency to incorporate elements from two disparate musical styles

Select-in-passage

This form of RC question requires that you highlight a specific sentence in the passage that matches the description and/or the information provided. A passage for this RC question may have up to two paragraphs of text.

Example: Select the sentence that distinguishes two ways of integrating rock and classical music.

The correct answer here is the last sentence of the passage. On a computer, you would be able to select this sentence by clicking it.

Tips for Reading Comprehension Questions

Read Dense Academic-Style Texts

This first tip applies to your preparation for the GRE and not the test-taking itself. Reading comprehension, in my experience, is best taught by reading the sort of text that the GRE tests. This sort of text is dense in vocabulary and has that academic feel that is quite distinct from everyday English.

In this regard, the three most valuable resources I recommend to students are The NewYorker, The Atlantic, Longreads.

These resources are perfect for the sort of prose you will encounter in GRE verbal. They will familiarize you with complex sentence structures, word usage, linking words, arguments, etc. I would advise that you spend at least an hour every day reading from these journals.

Think of an Answer As You Read the Passage

As you read the passage, try to come up with an answer as you go. This doesn’t mean the answer you come up with is final. Instead, you rely on your logic and intuition to fill in the blanks and present an answer that you think is suitable given the context.

Once you are done with the passage, look at the answer choices and see which one captures the one you came up with the most. Moreover, this will also allow you to spot the most blatantly wrong answer choices quickly.

However, don’t dwell on coming up with an answer for too long. Ideally, the answer should pop in your head as you go along. If it takes too long, then read the passage and move on to the answer choices.

Don’t Get Fixated on Difficult Questions.

This is very important. The moment you realize that you are having trouble with a question and taking you too long, skip the question. You only have limited time, and each second is valuable. If you get caught up in a difficult question, you risk running out of time for the questions ahead.

Understand that all questions, no matter the length or difficulty, carry equal points. There is no reason to waste substantial time on a particular question when instead, you could be answering easier ones.

Moreover, a little know fact about GRE is that the verbal section is much more forgiving in terms of mistakes than the quant section. Since the competition isn’t as high in verbal, you can answer up to four questions incorrectly and still get a 95th percentile score.

Read the introduction and conclusion if short on time

If you are running out of time, don’t bother with reading the whole passage. Instead, read the first and last paragraph of a given passage. Typically, the first and last paragraphs of GRE passages contain the most information relevant to the questions.

Generally, the first paragraph should contain the following:

• The topic of the passage
• The general scope of the passage
• The main point(s) of the passage

And the last paragraph or the conclusion should contain the following:

• The topic of the passage (restated)
• The main point(s) of the passage (restated)
• The importance of the passage and any results, consequences, findings, realizations, etc.

Use Process of Elimination

Every once in a while, you will come across a question that you cannot find the correct answer to. Here, you have to understand that wrong answers don’t cost you points. Hence, you should take a chance and pick an answer choice that you feel the most confident about, even if you aren’t a hundred percent sure.

To increase your chances of picking the correct answer choice, you can narrow down the options by eliminating answer choices that are wrong.

You can weed out the wrong choices by knowing how ETS chooses GRE passages. GRE is a global test, and it avoids using “absolute” or “extreme” language. Generally, absolute answer choices are incorrect. Some words that give away such an answer choice are the following:

• only
• all
• always
• every
• never
• exclusively

Moreover, there is usually an answer choice that has nothing to do with the passage’s topic. It will introduce a new idea or a fact that isn’t in the passage to begin with. These are the most apparent incorrect answers to spot.