GRE Prep Articles write an article

(This is a brief guide to approaching the GRE exam. I wrote this for primaprily an Indian audience and so it focusses on the verbal section of the exam. I think it will benefit anyone who's first language is not english.)
 
Friends and acquaintances often ask me how I prepared for the GRE exam. This owes itself to the fact that I did reasonably well at the exam. For the benefit of those who may seek them, in this post I present my views on the GRE and the method I used to prepare for it. I assume a reasonable familiarity with the exam. Also, what follows is my own opinion and by no means a definitive guide to the GRE.
A few observations to start with:
1. The GRE is, at best, a necessary evil. Different universities give your score different levels of importance. Since one can never know how much importance your dream university gives to your GRE score, it’s a good idea to do well. The objective should be to study as efficiently as possible in a very limited amount of time, get done with it ASAP and quickly go back to doing something fun or useful. No one cares about GRE scores once you begin grad school. Good projects and academic records are far better than good GRE scores as far as getting into a university goes.
2. The time required to prepare well varies for each individual. Don’t trust someone else’s estimate.
3. There are lakhs of words in the English language. You can’t possibly know them all in 5 lifetimes. Buy just one wordlist (Barrons/Kaplan/Other) and do it well. Don’t get distracted by the abundance of study material.
4. Accept the fact that luck can play a significant role in this exam.
5. Studying wordlists is NOT a waste of time. Most of those words, you will come across in the stuff you read. The GRE asks simple words that are in common use, but have different meanings in different contexts. If you waste time learning long, esoteric words of no consequence; you’re to blame, not the GRE. There are those who look down on memorizing wordlists. It helped me.
6. Starting to cultivate a habit of reading 6 months before your GRE, in an effort to boost your vocabulary is not a good idea. Reading for the fun of it is great, but if you think it will boost your GRE score, you’re wrong.
7. Preparing for the Analytical Writing section has a very small profit margin. But if you think you’re bad at writing, some practice is surely useful.
The Quant section:
This consists of simple...