|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
ANTONYM Fundamentals
There are three factors that are fundamental to your success on this
question type. Let’s take a look:
Vocabulary
We know we’re stating the obvious, but there’s simply no way around
it: The better your vocabulary, the better you’ll do on Antonym questions.
When you know the meaning of the original word and the words in the choices,
Antonym questions are perhaps the most straightforward on the GRE. Much like
in the childhood opposites act described earlier, the GRE may spit out word
X, prompting you to immediately spit back opposite word Y. For example, say
the word is sullen. You immediately think
gloomy or brooding, which causes something
along the lines of happy or joyful to pop
into your head as its opposite. Scanning the choices you come across
gleeful, and you’re done. Boom. Next question. This is
the best-case scenario that will play out whenever you know the words,
whether those words are easy or difficult.
The best way to improve your performance on GRE Antonyms is therefore
to add high-level words to your vocabulary. We encouraged you in the “Meet
GRE Verbal” chapter to read widely and deeply, and we suggest that you do so
with a dictionary by your side. Look up any unfamiliar words you come across
as you peruse the Economist or the New York
Times. You might consider keeping a list of words you don’t know or
don’t know well and adding those to the list of 400 GRE-level vocabulary
words we provide in the tear-out chart in this book.
Memorization
Use whatever methods work for you to memorize words. We won’t make
fun of your silly songs or poems, and no one will hear you chanting
strings of polysyllabic nouns in your car. What matters is that your
methods work—and that you learn the words.
You could make a CD with words and definitions and listen to it
while you drive or while you sleep, which, hopefully, are not
simultaneous activities. You could read the dictionary. You could hang
out with some really smart people who use big words whenever they can
(an annoying behavior practiced by sesquipedalian
individuals, people who use a big word when a small one would do). Here
are some more suggestions.
Use Flash Cards.
Flash cards are simple and portable. Write a word on one side
and its definition on the other. Take these cards with you wherever you
go and use them when you have a free minute or two. Think of a stack of
flash cards as a mini-quiz: You look at each word, think of the
definition, and then flip the card over to check yourself. If you get it
right, set the card aside. If you get it wrong, keep the card in the
stack. Repeatedly go through the stack until all the words are in your
“got it right” pile. Going through your flash cards in this way gives
you a clear-cut method for knowing when you know your words and when you
don’t.
Create Mnemonic Devices.
Some words are hard to remember, plain and simple. These are the
words that never seem to make it to your “got it right” pile, no matter
how many times you go through them. For these troublesome words,
mnemonic devices may be just what you need.
A mnemonic device is a memory aid, usually in the form of a word
association. The more off the wall a mnemonic device, the more effective
it tends to be. For example, if you have trouble remembering that
craven means “cowardly or weak-willed,” you could
think of Cliff Claven, the character from Cheers. Among
other things, Mr. Claven was pretty cowardly and weak-willed, so
craven could mean “like Cliff Claven.” Be
creative—you’ll find many tough words can be remembered through suitable
mnemonic devices.
Make Up Sentences.
Making up sentences is a great way to help you remember
difficult words. For each word, make up a sentence that gives a clue to
the word’s meaning. To be effective, your sentence must be specific. For
example, “Edgar is very philanthropic” wouldn’t be very
helpful, but “Since he always gives to charities, Edgar is very
philanthropic” provides a strong clue that
philanthropic means “of, relating to, or marked by
charity.”
Expanding your vocabulary will help you craft a number of “blue
sky” antonym scenarios—simply knowing the words and scanning to the
correct choice. But it’s still likely you’ll comes across at least some
cases in which you don’t know some of the vocab or have only a partial
understanding of the words in question.
The rest of the fundamentals in this section are intended to help
you at least narrow down the choices in such cases and at best eliminate
all but the correct answer.
Clues
There are numerous clues that can shed light on words you don’t know.
Will these clues help you to define unfamiliar words precisely? Probably
not, but they may often help you distinguish possible choices from unlikely
ones. Our first clue concerns how words are formed.
Roots, Prefixes, and Suffixes
New words aren’t created by people simply sitting around making
them up on the spot. If they were, there would probably be more fun
words like blissenfrazzle and fewer nasty words like
deleterious. Words are comprised of pieces that
reflect their origins and contribute to their definitions. Especially
important are roots, prefixes, and suffixes. By learning some of these
common building blocks, you’ll be able to make intelligent guesses on
words whose meanings you may not have memorized. Consider the following
fairly difficult Antonym question:
Circum is a prefix that means “around,” as in the
words circumference (“distance around a circle”) and
circumvent (“to go around or bypass”).
Loc and loq are common roots meaning
“to speak,” as in eloquent (“well spoken”) and
ventriloquist (“one who speaks through a wooden
dummy”). Putting these two pieces together,
circumlocution means “a roundabout way of speaking.”
The opposite of this is direct speaking or
concision, another word for which is
brevity, choice B.
Root, suffix, and prefix clues may not always lead you all the way
to the correct choice, as in the example above, but they can help you
get in the ballpark. It therefore pays to have a solid command of these
common word components. Here are some of the major building blocks of
English words, along with the related GRE words you might see on test
day. You’ll see some of these GRE words again in our vocabulary list in
the tear-out chart in this book. If you see a word that you don’t know,
look it up and learn it.
Helpful Roots
Helpful Prefixes and Suffixes
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||