target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#fb3_img_img_976ea016-ff21-5867-b499-ee45ad3272cd.png" alt="Play"/> Coerced by his kids into watching The LEGO Movie, Andy was (i) _____, although the movie surprisingly turned out to be (ii) _____.
First, interpret what the sentence is trying to say. The word although in the middle of the sentence tells you that the two phrases have different meanings — that the words in those blanks should be opposite, or close to it. Although is an example of a transition word, which can function as a valuable clue. (See the later section “Use transition words to get the gist of the phrases” for more on this.)
Ask yourself this: Was Andy eager or reluctant? Was The LEGO Movie surprisingly lame or good? That he was coerced tells you that Andy didn’t want to go, so he probably was reluctant and expected a lousy movie. Then he was surprised, so the movie was probably pretty good. This is how you tell what the sentence is trying to say.
Complete the text with your own words
The next step is finding your own words to complete the text. Your words don’t have to be perfect — you’re not writing the sentence — but they do have to support the meaning of the sentence. This way, you know exactly what to look for and can eliminate answer choices (which is the following step). Right now, you’re still covering up the answer choices with your scratch paper.
Try to picture what’s happening in the text. Even though you may arrange it differently, your key words will match the missing words in the question.
Coerced by his kids into watching The LEGO Movie, Andy was reluctant, although the movie surprisingly turned out to be, well … awesome.
You already know that Andy wasn’t looking forward to the movie, but the movie surprisingly was good.
Eliminate wrong answer choices
The final step to knocking out these questions is eliminating the wrong answer choices. Now that you know what the sentence is saying, the wrong answers are clear.
Here’s the example question again, this time with the answer choices provided.
Directions: For each blank, select one entry from the corresponding column of choices. Fill all blanks in the way that best completes the text.
Compare the answer choices, one at a time, to the words you already came up with on your own (reluctant and awesome). Cross thrilled and excited off the first list, because they have nothing to do with reluctant. Similarly, lousy and subpar are far from awesome. The correct answers are Choices (C), hesitant, and (F), a blast, which both match your predictions and make sense when you read the sentence.
Worst case, if you have to guess, you’ve narrowed down the answers to guess from. Then mark the question for review and return to it later.
Interpreting Trickier Sentences
If every Text Completion and Sentence Equivalence question were this easy, everyone would get a perfect 170 on the Verbal section (those who have this book, anyway), and testing would be pointless. However, the actual GRE questions can be more challenging to interpret. When you come across these sentences, start with the three basic strategies mentioned earlier and build on them with these steps:
1 Use transition words to get the gist of the phrases.
2 Start with the second or third missing word.
The following section goes further into these steps.
Use transition words to get the gist of the phrases
Transition words exist in most Text Completion and Sentence Equivalence questions (and other sentences) and serve as valuable clues to interpreting the meaning of a sentence. (Transition words connect two ideas in a sentence or paragraph and tell you whether the two ideas in the sentence agree or contradict one another.) Transition words help you decipher the meaning of a sentence with key words missing.
For example, changing the transition word in the following sentence completely alters its meaning:
Although he ran as fast as he could, Eric _____ the bus.
The transition word although, indicating contrast, tells you that Eric missed the bus. Consider the same sentence with a different transition word:
Because he ran as fast as he could, Eric _____ the bus.
The transition word because, indicating cause-and-effect, tells you that Eric caught the bus.
With a little practice, transition words become easy to identify and use to your advantage. They’re helpful when breaking the sentence into pieces (which is the next step) and are used frequently in the Analytical Writing portion of the GRE. (See Part 4 for more on the Analytical Writing essays.)
Common transition words include the following:
| although | and | because | but |
|---|---|---|---|
| despite | either/or | however |
in spite of
|
