GRE Sentence Completion

The Verbal Section of the GRE consists of 4 types of questions- Analogies, Antonyms, Reading Comprehension and Sentence Completion.

What’s in Sentence Completion?

The idea is pretty simple- you’re given a sentence with one or two missing words, marked by a blank (__). You’re also given 5 choices for words, and you’ve got to select the word that best completes the given sentence. That’s it.

The section relies heavily on vocabulary. You’ll need to know the words given in order to be able to judge whether they could fit into the blanks. Vocabulary is crucial for the entire Verbal Section, so in order to practice for sentence completion you should first work on improving your vocabulary by reading word lists and such.

How do we solve these?

The best way to start is to read the sentence, but ignore the choice words. Try to come up with your own word that can fit in the blank. If you can’t understand the sentence at all and can’t think of a word that fits, you might want to move on- with 1 minutes per word, you shouldn’t be wasting time on questions you can’t answer.

If you have a simple word that might fit the blank, start comparing that word to the choices you’re given. Eliminate any words that clearly don’t have the same meaning as the word you thought of. Then choose the closest word of the leftover choices.

When dealing with 2 blanks, work on them one at a time- it should save you time later. Try to judge the relationship between the blanks- are you looking for two words that are similar, or words that are opposites?

Always look for words like ‘but’, ‘however’, ‘thus’, ‘therefore’, and other words that can provide useful hints about the word you’re looking for- is it a word that supports or refutes the argument?

Use the above techniques to solve Sentence Completion questions, but remember that if your practice tests aren’t going well, the best way to do it is just read and increase your knowledge of words and vocabulary, and practicing as many practice tests as possible.

Sentence Examples:

While some of the information in this lecture would be shocking to some students, most of the material taught by the lecturer is quite (blank).

1. Surprising
2. Dubious
3. Banal
4. Important
5. Astonishing

Answer: Note the word ‘while’ at the beginning of the sentence, this should hint that you’re looking for the opposite of a certain word. As the sentence is structured, it becomes clear you need a word that means the opposite of ‘shocking’. Banal is the best option here. If you don’t know what banal means, you can still eliminate some answers- surprising and astonishing mean the same thing as shocking, so they must be wrong.

Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, now recognized as an important step in understanding economics, was largely (blank1) when it was first released. In fact, it was years until its value was (blank2) by other economists.

1. Unkown; Relegated
2. Hailed; Accepted
3. Understood; Accomplsihed
4. Ignored; Regarded
5. Evaluated; Resulted

Answer: Try the first blank first- it’s hard to judge which is the right word, but you can sort of see that ‘hailed’ and ‘evaluated’ don’t fit. The second blank is clearer- you’re looking for a word that’s similar to ‘recognized’. Regarded is the best choice, and ‘Ignored’ fits perfectly into the first blank, so D is the best option.

Online GRE Practice Tests

Practice here some of the GRE sentence completion tests:, GRE Sentence Completion (10 questions), GRE Sentence Completion Sample Questions (10 questions), GRE SC Practice Test (10 questions), GRE Sentence Completion Practice Test (8 questions).

More Verbal Questions:

Check out the other types of questions in the Verbal Section of the GRE- Reading Comprehension, Antonyms and Analogies questions.