Studying!

Forgive me Blog, for I have ignored you.

It's been 10 days since my last post.

What have I been doing during that time? Work work work study study study. It is a testament to the sadism of education that most people must study endlessly for these hugely significant entrance exams. Don't get me wrong, I like to be prepared for evaluations and everything; I'd just rather be prepared for evaluations based on more interesting material.

For most of the summer I have been brushing up on my mathematical skills. It's a tough job as I haven't really exercised them since high school. As with muscles, if you don't exercise a skill enough then it's likely to deteriorate. That's where I started from when I picked up my GRE Math Prep book. It is pretty handy in the way it's organized. It starts from simple arithmetic skills, then moves on to Algebra, then Word Problems, then Geometry, then Quantitative Comparison, then it gives you 30 question practice tests covering every area of math one should have learned after working through the whole book. The main issue after you've finished this book is speed. How fast can you reason through each problem? How well can you prioritize / budget your time? Which questions are the most important to spend time on and which ones should you make educated guesses on? I still have to take more GRE practice tests just to make sure I know how to deal with the time constraints.

Yesterday I began my vocabulary studying. You might say that it's quite late to be doing that, but thank G-d my vocabulary skills have been exercised abundantly throughout my University career. I'm reading through a book by Princeton Review called Word Smart for the GRE. As the link I just posted indicates, I purchased it from www.amazon.ca . It is cheap in price, small in size, but great in its value. It starts off by giving you strategies for memorizing word lists, advice about the vocab section on the GRE, and some reasons why expanding your vocabulary is important. Then it goes into quizzes where you: match a word up with its antonym, match a word up with its simple definition, fill in the blanks found within sentences, and create sentences that indicate the relationship between couplets of words presented in several lists (an exercise to increase your ability to recognize relationships between words in analogy questions on the GRE). Now the big task is to try my best to learn huge alphabetically ordered word lists in the biggest chapter in the book. That could take about 9 days, if I divide up the alphabetic total by parts of 2 and a half letters each day.

Well... I guess the remainder of my study time is going to involve solidifying my knowledge of GRE vocabulary and testing myself with any practice GREs that I can find.

Please wish that my efforts will be successful :)

- Inkhorn