The verbal section of the GRE tests your reading comprehension skills, verbal reasoning skills, and vocabulary knowledge. Like the quant sections, each verbal section has 12 or 15 questions you’ll need to answer within 18 or 23 minutes. There are only three types of questions in the verbal section:
The text completion and sentence equivalence questions test your verbal reasoning and vocabulary, whereas reading comprehension tests your ability to understand dense texts. Don’t be intimidated! We’ll discuss many strategies and tips that make these problems easier to digest and understand.
We’ll walk through some example questions in the following chapters to illustrate the approach to solving these questions. These chapters don’t have repeatable review quizzes like the quantitative ones because there’s no way for us to effectively randomize them as they are tied to unique text prompts. If you took them a second time, you would unconsciously remember the answer, and it wouldn’t be particularly helpful.
Instead, we have full-length verbal reasoning sections on the practice exams page when you’re ready. You can only take these one time each, so make sure to read through the entire verbal reasoning chapter first to understand the concepts!