Remember Legos, fellow GRE-nauts? More specifically, remember when a set of Legos was just a mass of blocks in different sizes, with nary a specialized “windshield” or “leg” piece to be found? Sure, you might not have been able to exactly build the Millennium Falcon, but that was made up for by the fact that you weren’t held back by any specialization. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to do that with words on your GRE Antonyms and Analogies?
Of course it would. And you can! We can break words down into their component parts, called “roots,” and roots, my friends, are totally radical (from RADIX, possessive RADICIS, meaning “[tree] root”). With a good, strong knowledge of word roots, you never have to be afraid of big – or small, for that matter – words again. Say we’re in the middle of the analogies section and get this:
SYNCHRONICTY : SIMULTANEOUS
OK. Synchronicity. A seminal album by The Police. What’s that got to do with SIMULTANEOUS? They all worked together on it, I suppose, though, with recording that’s not a “must”…. If we know our word roots, this is no problem.
SYN, we know, is a Greek root for “together” or “with” and also appears in words like SYMPATHY, and SYNTHESIS.
CHRON means time, because we remember the CHRONOMETERS from when we used to wear wristwatches.
And ICITY just makes a word a noun (which we could also guess from the answer choices).
So SYNCHRONICITY is time-together-ness, which is a noun synonym (SYN again!) for SIMULTANEOUS (from SIMUL, meaning “at the same time,” in case you were wondering), and we’re off to the races.
Remember, on the GRE Verbal section, the quickest way to the answer is just to know the word, and building words from the ground up with roots is like a “Buy One Word, Get 200 Words Free” Sale. Pay attention to etymologies, ask yourself which words look similar and why, and you’re on your way to an 800.
(Written by: Beau Henson-Kaplan test prep)
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