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Questions Answered in this Posting: How much time is enough to prepare for TOEFL? What's the key to good preparation? How to prepare for GRE? Quantitative
section Analytical
section Verbal section Example questions? How to prepare specifically for GRE? How much time is enough to prepare for TOEFL? Normally 1 week of preparation
is more than sufficient. The preparation means taking practice exams only.
6-8 papers are more than enough. In fact, excessive preparation may harm you.
Some practice questions and other related material for TOEFL can be found at
www.toefl.org. TWE:
TWE stands for Test of Written English. It is given before TOEFL in the same
sitting and is of 30 minutes duration. It is scored out of 6.0. You may get
scores like 6/6, 5.5/6, 5/6 etc. It consists of writing an essay on one of
the several(3? - It seems that the format has changed now and there may not
be a choice anymore in computer based TOEFL) given topics. An example of a
topic is "Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? Parents
are the best teachers. Give specific reasons and examples to support your
answer" (ref:
www.toefl.org - more examples of topics can be found at ftp://etsis1.ets.org/pub/toefl/989563wt.pdf). Usually, the topic
would require you to take stand on an issue and you would be expected to
support you stand with examples and logic. What's the key to good preparation? Obviously, write some essays. Again, Any number
between 1 and 4 should be enough depending upon your level of confidence.
AVOID GRAMMATICAL MISTAKES. I do not believe using fancy words would help
you. (You may be lured into using some of the 12 lettered words after
preparing for GRE but don’t use them unless you are confident about their
making sense in the context of your essay). The bottom line is to keep the
essay organized, avoiding unnecessary complexity. TWE
scores are not very important as such in funding decisions though some
universities may require you to have a score of at least 4 or 4.5 out of 6, just
to ensure a certain minimal level of competence in composing an essay.
However, it is not difficult to get a 5 or 5.5 or even 6. How to prepare for GRE? Quantitative section of GRE does not require any preparation. This section
contains questions from Arithmetic and elementary algebra, standard of which
is not higher than the Class X math paper of school boards in India. However,
there is a long list of people who goofed up their quantitative score simply
because this section was too easy. The key is not to enter your answers in
hurry - do check your answer once before pressing the key in CBT. The
"marking" in this section is hard and so a single or two wrong
answer(s) may cost you aplenty. An Example of a question: 1.
The average (arithmetic mean) of x and y is 20. If z = 5, what is the average
of x, y, and z?
If
the farmer plants corn, the farmer also plants beans that year. Question:
Which of the following is a possible sequence of combinations for the farmer
to plant in two successive years?
Therapists find that
treatment of those people who seek help because they are unable to stop
smoking or overeating is rarely successful. From these experiences,
therapists have concluded that such habits are intractable and that success
in breaking them is rare. A)
there have been some successes in therapy, and those successes were counted
in the surveys B)it
is easier to stop smoking than it is to stop overeating D)the
group of people selected for the surveys did not include those who failed to
break their habits even after therapy E)those
who succeed in curing themselves do not go for treatment and so are not
included in the therapists' data (Ref:
www.gre.org) It
helps to make diagrams in order to better understand the situation outlined
in the question. Finally, the Verbal section: Essentially, preparing for GRE (other than practice
exams) implies preparing for this section. One requires good vocabulary and
good reading comprehension skills to perform well in this section. If you are
in second year or first year and would like to work towards improving
vocabulary, there are two ways to do that: 1)
The First one is reading books. It's painful to look into a dictionary
everytime a new word is encountered. So, a viable strategy could be to
underline words and look for their meanings once in a while. Not only this,
whenever u come across a new word, 2)
The other method is solving crosswords. I guess Economic times', Sunday
times' and hindu's crosswords are good and challenging. Now some general
comments: *
A very popular short cut is to take word lists and mug them. This surely is
not the best way to improve vocab if there is no time constraint since it
does not take very long to forget them as well. *
Some books are available in market - for example - A book by Norman Lewis -
with title something like - improve vocab in 60 days. Such books can also be
good starting points but again without following it by reading or by
crosswords, it may not prove to be fruitful. *
Attending Lit-sec events like "wordsworth" (I am not sure if this
is the correct name) also helps. How to
prepare specifically for GRE? Depending upon your
score, the ideal preparation time could be anything between 3 months to 6-7
months. The preparation includes memorizing word lists from Barron’s. There are
50 word lists in Barrons containing around 4000 words. Those words have been
taken from GRE papers in past. But be cautious, Barron's does not give all
the meanings of a particular word but gives only the meaning(s) as intended
in the actual exam(s) from which the word had been taken. So, do check the
dictionary for each word. You may check thesaurus for each word as well. |