GRE Vocab prep

[greybeta]

Okay, I admit that I'm in a bit of trouble on the GRE. On my practice test, I scored a measly 500 (out of 800). Fifty seventh percentile. That wouldn't be too bad of a score for an engineer, but I'm a history major now so I'm pretty sure that I'll need to bring that up at least 150 points. One major weakness I had was on analogies and antonyms (getting less than fifty percent correct). I remember doing some vocabulary builders in high school for the SATs, but I've regressed in that area. I suppose I could take the GRE prep class, but that's a lot of money. I'm sure I could pull up the 670 on my quantitive section by taking a bit more time.

Fortunately, while on a random trip to Borders to look through the manga section, I happened upon a GRE Vocab builder book made by the Kaplan people. It's a book full of ready-made flashcards, complete with parts of speech, sample sentences, pronunciation guide, and synonyms. It was only fifteen bucks, which I figured was worth the time I would have spent making flashcards on the 594 most commonly tested vocab words on the GRE. My mysterious suitemate wldntulk2knwwho (who bought the first two volumes of MegaTokyo while we were at Borders) and decided to split the words into 49.5 sets of twelve (they come in sheets of six). We realized how much in trouble we were with the first two sets. Sigh, I'm going to have to deal with these words as an academia sooner or later so it might as well be sooner. And I'm going to try to commit these words into long term memory.

I'd just like to note some of the words that have been used on Magic cards, linking to Star City.

abeyance - temporary supression or suspension
The baseball game was held in abeyance while it continued to rain.
synonyms: deferral, delay, dormancy, postponement, remission
Ah, the typical white card that only delays the problem.

abjure - to reject; abandon formally
The spy abjured his allegiance to the United States when he defected to Russia.
synonyms: forswear, recall, recant, retract, take back
Magic card from Weatherlight.

abyss - a deep pit or hole
I'm sure most people know what this means, and it was one of the coolest Magic cards ever.

aerie - a nest built high in the air; an elevated, often secluded dwelling
Perched high among the trees, the eagle's aerie was filled with eggs.
synonyms: perch, stronghold
The Magic card Soulcatcher's Aerie comes to mind

Comments

[greybeta.livejournal.com]

This is where I would get totally owned, because I would have chosen C)puppy:dog without much qualms.

That, and often the analogies include words that I don't have a clue what they mean. Like affected doesn't mean "effected";rather affected means "phony" or "artificial" as in "The affected hairdresser spouted French phrases, though she had never been to France". Currently, I'm just trying to get step one down, which is knowing the meanings of words.

[wolflady26.livejournal.com]

Oh, erm, actually puppy and dog are right. I didn't read the choices closely enough ;) As the site puts it: " Is a child a young adult? Now this one may seem a little tricky, because a child will eventually age to become an adult, but we are not looking for the relationship of young to old, we are instead looking for the relationship of young of some kind of animal to that animal. If instead the answer choice was child : human, then this relationship would be similar to that of kitten : cat, since child is the young of humans, and we would need to consider this choice further."

*slinks away and resolves to ponder her advice more carefully next time*

[greybeta.livejournal.com]

Reading the site a bit more, I find that they probably meant to have C)dog:puppy to illustrate that word order matters on these stupid analogies.