HOMEWORK:

In this class, we talked about the remaining passage strategies, notably Some Words are More Important and Predicting What's Next. Please do the following for homework:

Some Words are More Important
- Identify the most important words in the passage
- GRE Big Book, p. 823 (Geologists have long known...)
- GRE Official Guide, p. 444 (in my book) (The attribution of early...)
Predicting What's Next
- What do you think the author will do after?
- Exercise 1: As a way of reconciling these two facts, scientists have hypothesized that nearly all of the oxygen being produced was taken up by the Earth's surface.
- Exercise 2: To obtain empirical data regarding the energy costs of singing, Thomas examined the relationship between song rate and overnight changes in body mass of male nightingales.
- Exercise 3: These results suggest that there may be several costs of singing at night associated with body reserves.
- Exercise 4: It would be expected that a figure as prominent as W.E.B. DuBois would attract the attention of literary critics.

We also worked on identifying question type. This is very important because the strategy we use for a particular question depends on its type. They can roughly be categorized into three main categories:

Factual (details straight from the passage)
- Strategies used: simplifying and rephrasing sentences
Purpose (what is the author doing? Why?)
- Strategies used: identifying sentence and paragraph function, main idea (for primary purpose)
Inferences
- Strategies used: simplifying and rephrasing sentences, but also combining the evidence in a "puzzle-like" way to get the right answer.

For homework, identify the question type for all questions in the following passages:

GRE Big Book, p. 570 (The Ice Age passage)
GRE Big Book, p. 582 (The aluminum passage)
GRE Big Book, p. 583 (The study of history passage)

GRE Reading Strategy Series

Cohort #1 (Reading)