GRE Text Completion: Practice Questions 2025, Tips, and Strategies

GRE Text Completion questions test your ability to understand and interpret what you read. Skilled readers don’t just read words; they think about the meaning, make connections, and adjust their understanding as they go. In these questions, some important words are missing from a short passage. Your task is to use the rest of the passage to choose the words or phrases that correctly fill the blanks, creating a clear and meaningful sentence or passage.

GRE verbal section scores range from 130 to 170, with text completion questions making up about 40% of this score. By regularly practicing GRE text completion questions, you can become familiar with the question types and boost your verbal reasoning score.

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GRE Text Completion Question Types

Candidates can expect 12 text completion questions in total, with 6 text-completion questions in each section of the GRE verbal. The table below summarises the overview of the question pattern in GRE text completion:

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GRE Text Completion Tips and Strategies

There are a number of GRE tips that can help candidates ace the GRE exam pattern. Aspirants can comply with these tips to ensure effective preparation for GRE fill-in-the-blank questions. Moreover, this will also help them to strategize their approach for attempting GRE text completion questions and GRE sentence equivalence. Mentioned below are some of the valuable tips:

• Skim through the passage to derive a concept of the given texts
• Look for words like although or moreover. These words emphasize the structure of the passage or help with the overall understanding of the given texts.
• Attempt GRE fill-in-the-blank questions with words or phrases that seem to complete the sentence. Given the condition of similar words being mentioned in the options.
• Candidates might think that there is a definite order to attempt GRE text completion questions. However, it is not necessary that the first question needs to be harder and needs to be filled first. Perhaps one of the other blanks is easier to fill first. Select your choice for that GRE fill-in-the-blank, and then see whether you can complete another blank.
• Post selecting the answer, check for logical, grammatical, and coherence within your answers to gain appropriate GRE scores.

Effective measures can be adapted to practice GRE text completion practice questions to build the skills of the aspirants for the GRE exam pattern. However, you must undertake immense practice of GRE text completion sample questions. Below are a few strategies:

• Divide the texts into understandable sentences

When dealing with the length of GRE text completion, the questions that consist of an entire paragraph can be difficult. In that case, before you consider any of the answer choices, break the text completion up into smaller paragraphs. Try this while solving text completion practice questions. This way, it would be easier during finals.

To understand this, consider the following example:

To solve this question, break the texts into smaller fragments in your own words. Doing this will help aspirants to find the appropriate words for each blank. Let’s justify this with the first sentence:

“For centuries now, cancer has (i) ___________ scientists.”

Confused here is the correct word. Candidates are to look for the word that is closest to the meaning of the word confused. From the above options, confounded is the correct word. Thus, the answer to this question will be confounded.

• Keep a check on word use and idiom problems

GRE text completion questions make use of words as well as idioms to express ideas. Thus, the texts become tricky, and aspirants need to understand the motive behind the texts. This will help them to eliminate the options or choices that result in the sentence appearing puzzling or awkward. To understand this, consider the following example:

In the above-mentioned question, candidates can take a hint from the last line of the passage; ‘Sometimes the petty differences end up fatally.’ Thus, even though the social bonding in crows, bees, and humans is strong. Sometimes they also quarrel amongst themselves, and this can sometimes lead to loss of life. Thus, the answer is: Humans, too, like all (i) gregarious creatures who bond together, such as the crows and bees, have their (ii) quibbles. Sometimes the petty differences end up fatal.

• Understand the relationship between texts

While solving GRE text completion & sentence equivalence in big paragraphs. You’ll also need to understand their relationships with one another.

For instance, consider the following example:

You’ll notice that each choice for the GRE fill-in-the-blanks would be grammatically correct if selected. Here we see that John’s essay discusses three novelists. Two of whom are responsible for a number of American classics and the other who are not quite considered in the same regard. The sentence does not discuss the writer’s notoriety, however, allowing us to eliminate “nuanced” as an option for Blank 2. Since Tartt’s novels are far less sacred than Poe and Emerson, we land on “canonical” as the right choice for Blank 2.

• Insert your own words

Once you’ve broken a passage down and understand the relationship between the texts. Try inserting your own words, even before considering any of the answer choices for either blank. Considering the example taken earlier, we begin by inserting words that are used far more often in everyday conversation.

John’s final essay covered the works of such ________ figures in American Literature as Poe and Emerson, comparing them to the less obviously ________ words of Hilary Mantel.

Since we’re looking for two words similar in nature. We can use the word “historic” for both blanks. Most importantly, we can now use this to find the closest match to “historical” in each of the answer choices. This would point us again to “established” and “canonical.”