Preliminary Study Plan – VR

Assignment 1: Active Reading (30 min/day) 

Inculcate a habit of reading articles based on topics, such as Science (Biology, Chemistry & Physics), Technology, History, Geography, Philosophy, Psychology, Sociology, Art, Literature, Economics, Politics, etc.

You can refer to The New York Times, The Guardian, The Economist, Scientific American, BBC News, IOPscience2, and The Royal Society, etc.

You can also start reading fiction and non-fiction books. Some of them can be downloaded here:

1. A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
2. Angels and Demons – Dan Brown
3. Animal Farm – George Orwell
4. Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
5. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
6. Sherlock Holmes Illustrated – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
7. The Alchemist – Paulo Coelho
8. The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexander Dumas
9. The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
10. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
11. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
12. The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
13. The Origin of Species – Charles Darwin
14. Timeline – Michael Crichton
15. Tuesdays With Morrie – Mitch Albom

Follow the below process to read a particular article:

• Refer to any of the above sources.
• Choose a particular article.
• Read the article as many times as you want. Ideally, read it until you have understood the entire article.
• Close the article and write a small summary of whatever you have understood (not more than 5-6 lines)

Write down all difficult words (My GRE Words) that you come across when you read these articles and study their synonyms from https://www.thesaurus.com/. It is good to prepare vocabulary as that will help you in Text Completion and Sentence Equivalence questions on your GRE.

Assignment 2: Vocabulary Building (30 min/day)

Learn and revise words on a daily basis until you take your actual GRE.

• Learn ONE wordlist daily from the VOCABULARY BUILDING BOOK. Each wordlist has 20 words.
• Read each word aloud and apply the vocabulary-building strategies to remember it.
• Remember the given meaning and synonyms of each word.
• Write new words and their meanings/synonyms in a diary (My GRE Words).

Before you take any new wordlists, first revise the previous wordlist. On Sundays, please revise all wordlists learnt during the previous week. Don’t practice any new wordlists on Sundays.