Let’s first understand the skills needed to score high in the Verbal section.

The two most fundamental skills for topping the Verbal section are Vocabulary and Reading Skills. Following them are the Verbal Reasoning Skills that are needed to:

Locate clues Locate clues in an incomplete sentence by reading thoroughly and making notes if needed

Draw Inferences Draw the right inferences from what is not explicitly talked about by the author in a passage.

GRE Verbal Reasoning practice or GRE verbal practice test should, in summary, involve the development of all these skills in a smart and efficient manner.

The first step towards improving your Verbal Reasoning skills is to master at least 400-500 GRE words. This will help you understand the context of usage and distinguish between similar answer choices clearly, which is essential for answering Sentence Equivalence and Text Completion accurately.

So, you must understand the meaning, the synonyms, the context of usage as well as degree of intensity.

In general, once you complete your preparation you must be thorough with 3000+ GRE words so that you have a strong hold on Verbal. This means that you will have to learn Vocabulary in parallel with other aspects of your GRE Preparation.

It is good to be thorough with 3000+ words. Apart from the definitions of words, one needs to know the contexts in which the words are used, the nuances of the words, and their synonyms. A mastery of this kind helps you in answering the Text Completion and Sentence Equivalence question types of GRE Verbal.