GRE Verbal Reasoning Reading Comprehension

There are three types of questions you will encounter on the Verbal Reasoning sections of the GRE: Reading Comprehension, Sentence Equivalence, and Text Completion. According to ETS, the creator and administrator of the GRE, the three types of questions make up the following percentages of the Verbal Reasoning sections:

Verbal Reasoning Question Type	Percentage of Verbal Reasoning Questions
Reading Comprehension	50%
Sentence Equivalence	25%
Text Completion	25%

Reading Comprehension questions make up about half of all Verbal Reasoning questions, where they will be intermingled with Sentence Equivalence and Text Completion questions. While other question types are more concentrated on vocabularly usage and understanding, Reading Comprehension questions are focused on the analysis of a passage.

For Reading Comprehension questions, you are given a passage of text to read. You then must answer questions about the content and structure of the passage to demonstrate your comprehension of what you read. Reading Comprehension passages vary in length from one paragraph to several paragraph. Each passage will correspond to 1-6 questions. The test will contain approximately 10 passages, most of which are a single paragraph in length. One or two Reading Comprehension passages per test will be several paragraphs long. In addition to long passages, there are also very short “Argument Structure Passages” of 25-75 words that correspond to a single question. There will usually be one Argument Structure Passage per Verbal Reasoning section.

Reading Comprehension Passages

Reading Comprehension questions are intended to test a wide range of abilities including:

• understanding the meaning of paragraphs and large bodies of text as well as individual words and sentences
• summarizing passages
• distinguishing between major and minor points
• drawing conclusions and making inferences from incomplete data
• understanding the structure of a text
• identifying authorial assumptions and perspective
• analyzing a text and reaching conclusions about it
• identifying strengths and weaknesses of a position
• developing and considering alternative explanations. 

The GRE Reading Comprehension questions can be very challenging, especially because the content of the passages may be boring or difficult material that you will not be interested in. Time management is critical on these sections, because all of the answers to the questions can be found inside the reading passage.

In addition, the computer-based test makes it easy to mark questions for review so that you can answer them later. For the Reading Comprehension sections, it is wisest to answer all of the questions for a passage once you have analyzed it—if you need to return to the same question later, you will waste time re-reading the passage to find information. Nevertheless, if a passage seems particularly difficult or uninteresting to you, it may be wise to skip the entire passage until the end of the section. The more practice tests you take, the more you will discover the strategies that work best for you when answering Reading Comprehension questions.

The content of Reading Comprehension passages varies tremendously. The subject matter may come from Natural Sciences (Astronomy, Physics, Biology, etc.), Social Sciences (Philosophy, History, etc.), Business-related content (Business History, Marketing, Economic Theory, etc.), or other topics that may be relevant to graduate study. The passages will be written in GRE style, which will undoubtedly appear bland and tasteless compared to what you usually read. Even a passage on your favorite topic may be difficult to get through because of the complexity of its structure and the depth of the information it presents.

Reading Comprehension Strategy

Once you have chosen a passage to analyze, it is important for you to make use of active reading strategies to ensure you are able to efficiently process, digest, and utilize information to answer questions effectively.

One effective strategy is to outline the passage while you are reading, reverse-engineering the main ideas, arguments, and important pieces of information that the passage discusses. This will organize the content of the passage in a more easily presentable format, so that once you begin answering questions you will have a resource to help you. This technique is especially useful if you must skip a question and return to it at the end of the section, as it refreshes your memory of what you were thinking about a passage without requiring you to reread the entire text, which will cost you valuable time.

Success on the Reading Comprehension questions requires active engagement with the texts, including asking questions, forming hypotheses, and reflecting on the relationship of the text to other texts and information. It may be helpful for you to diagram the important components of a passage as you find them—things such as keywords, transition phrases, points to illustrate main ideas or arguments, or notes to remember important pieces of information. Whether you diagram the passage or not, you should carefully read and analyze the entire passage before trying to answer any of the questions.

While you are reading, it is also important to prioritize the information that will help you answer questions. Not everything included in a passage is useful, and Reading Comprehension questions are designed to test your ability to sift through extraneous information and focus on what matters. Particular things to notice include:

• distinguishing main ideas from supporting ideas and evidence
• noticing whether the author is advancing ideas or merely reporting something previously mentioned or unrelated
• evaluating whether the author is committed to an idea or is hypothetical and speculative
• identifying transitions and transition keywords in the text
• tracking the relationship between different ideas and whether they support or contrast with each other. 

Once you have analyzed the passage, read the questions carefully, and answer each one based only on information from the passage; do not rely on outside knowledge, even if you have extensive personal experience with the subject matter. Refer back to the passage as often as necessary to find the information you need. Sometimes your views or opinions may conflict with the passage, so be sure to work carefully within the context of what you have been given to read and what you have been asked to do with what you have read. Try to answer all of the questions for each passage once you have read it, for if you return to the questions later you may need to reread the passage, which can cost you valuable time.

Test Structure

Reading Comprehension sections can pose two types of multiple-choice questions, and it is important to be able to distinguish between them on test day to ensure that you answer each type appropriately.

One of the best ways to remember what type of question you are answering is to pay attention to the formatting of the test: single-answer multiple choice questions use “bubble” formatting for the answers (so you can only select one answer at a time), whereas multiple-answer multiple choice questions use “box-selection” formatting for the answers (so you can select one or more answers, as appropriate). The best way to become familiar with this distinction is to take multiple practice tests, which will allow to become faster at recognizing the two different types of questions and answering each one correctly.

When you come across a multiple-answer multiple choice question, you must select every correct answer; if you fail to do so, you will not receive any credit for the question, as there is no partial credit on the GRE. It is very easy to rush through Reading Comprehension questions and assume you know how to answer them, but careless mistakes that could be avoided with additional focus can cost you important points that might have made a significant difference to your score. Taking practice exams will help you learn to accurately and efficiently distinguish between multiple-choice and multiple-answer multiple choice Reading Comprehension questions, ensuring you achieve your highest test score possible.