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| The Verbal Section Passing Strategies |  The Verbal section of the ISEE contains a total of 40 questions, together with sentence completions and synonyms. For the Lower Level, students are given 40 minutes to complete the questions and for the Middle and Upper Levels, they are given 20 minutes to complete the same number of questions.
Within the 40-question Verbal section, 20 of the questions are sentence completions. These are possibly the easiest types of questions on the exam, but they can surely be puzzling with no right strategies. For these questions, students are required to choose the best word from the multiple choice selections to fill in the blank and complete the sentence. Building a strong vocabulary base is very important for best answering the sentence completion questions. Except that students should use the predicting and plugging that is practice-makes-perfect strategy.
Previous to looking at the answer choices, the student should try to complete the sentence with his or her own word selection.
Next is the plugging step. Once the student has selected what he or she feels would be a good fill-in-the-blank word, he or she should look at the multiple choice selections and try to find an answer that best resembles his or her own.
The other 20 questions on the Verbal section are synonyms — two words that bear the same meaning. Again, for this section, building a strong vocabulary with a variety of reading and learning the prefixes, suffixes, and roots of words is the most important. On the other hand, a great instrument for solving synonym questions is the define and select method.
On the whole, when a stem word is given, the student should come up with his or her own definition of the word. Then he or she should read every of the multiple choice selections and choose which word best fits his or her definition.
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