Antonyms
One of the milestones of language acquisition is the discovery that things
in the world actually have opposites—not just nouns like day
and night but also verbs like push and
pull and adjectives like rich and
poor. Soon after making this discovery, kids find
themselves paraded as geniuses by proud parents showing them off to anyone who
will listen. “Up,” the parents would say, to which the child would dutifully
respond “down.” This jaw-dropping linguistic display would inevitably be
followed by classics like in and out and
high and low, much to the amazement of the
audience. What would really be a neat trick would be if the parents said
“obdurate” and the kid responded “compliant.” Flashing forward twenty odd years,
GRE Antonym questions give you the opportunity to reprise your role as Master of
Opposites—except this time no one’s applauding. Knocking back these nine or so
questions interspersed throughout the Verbal section will, however, help you get
into grad school, which should be reward enough.
Antonym questions test not only your vocabulary but also your ability to
reason from a concept to its opposite. So while a solid vocabulary is the most
important factor in success, a bit of logic comes into play as well. As always,
we’ll get things started with an X-ray.
