GR-1.4 Aptitude: verbal ability

Work through these

• Watch the course's lectures on reading comprehension strategy, then time yourself on two passages

  How to read a passage for the questions rather than for pleasure: what to mark, what to skip, and when to go back. The two timed passages are where the strategy either holds or does not.

• Sentence correction: one timed set, and for each error the grammar rule in one line

  The questions where a rule is being tested and the options are written to look alike. Naming the rule after each answer is how twenty questions turn into six rules you now own.

• Vocabulary in context: synonyms, antonyms and one-word substitutions, one set each

  Vocabulary as the paper actually tests it, which is by context and contrast rather than by definition. A word met in a sentence stays; a word met in a list does not.

• Paragraph ordering: one timed set, and write how you found the opening sentence each time

  Jumbled sentences are solved from the ends: the sentence that can open and the one that can close. Writing how you found the opener makes the method repeatable under time.

• Read one long article a day for two weeks and write a two-line summary of each

  The habit that carries the whole section. Fourteen articles is not much reading, but summarising each in two lines is comprehension practice of exactly the kind the paper sets.

• A mixed twenty-five-question verbal set in twenty-five minutes

  The types mixed and timed, as the paper serves them. Verbal sections are where students run out of time most often, so the clock matters more here than in any other set.