GRE\u00a0Text Completion questions feature a brief passage (from one to five sentences) in which one to three words have been left blank.\u00a0 You are given a menu of words for each blank, and you choose the answers for all blanks concurrently in order to reconstruct a sensible and meaningful passage.\u00a0 In questions with multiple blanks, you need to select the correct choice for every blank in order to get credit.
\nThe basic strategy for this type of question is
\n1) Read the whole passage actively (noting signpost words and key phrases)
\n2) Ask “How can I make sense of this passage?”\u00a0 If possible, come up with your own words that fit
\n3) Find the answer choice(s) that matches the sense of the passage arrived at in step two
\n4) Reread the passage with your answer and confirm that it works logically, grammatically and stylistically
\nThese tasks become a little more complicated in a multiple blank question, and we’ll focus on that in another entry.
\nLet’s get started with a simpler one-blank ETS sample question:
\n“Dramatic literature often _____\u00a0 the history of a culture in that it takes as its subject matter the important events that have shaped and guided the culture.”
\n– confounds \u00a0 – repudiates \u00a0 – recapitulates \u00a0 – anticipates \u00a0 – polarizes
\nWe’ll use the basic strategy outlined above.\u00a0 First, read the whole sentence; note the construction “in that it takes.”\u00a0 This is a signpost indicating to the reader that the second part of the sentence is an explanation or restatement of the first part.\u00a0 That means we want a word that would make the first part and second part equivalent or similar.\u00a0 In step two we come up with our own words such as “reflects,” “reveals,” or “traces.”\u00a0 Those might not appear in the answers, but this process insures that we really do have an understanding of the passage.
\nWe turn to the answer choices in step three.\u00a0 “Confounds,” “repudiates,” and “polarizes” do not fit the basic sense of the passage we’ve come up with.\u00a0 So let’s focus on “recapitulates” and “anticipates.”\u00a0 Both of these seem plausible, and neither are particularly obscure words.\u00a0 This is an example of how the test focuses more on distinctions of context.\u00a0 Does “anticipates” work?\u00a0 \u00a0 This would require literature to anticipate the history of the culture, in a sense predicting it or happening before the events themselves–that’s an interesting hypothesis but not the one suggested by the tense of the passage, where the subject matter are the events that “have shaped” the culture.\u00a0 We’re left with “recapitulates.”\u00a0 Rereading the sentence with this word, we find that the first part of the sentence now indeed reflects the second part in both the connection of literature and history and their causal order.
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