Text Completion (TC) presents a short passage — one to five sentences — with one, two, or three blanks. Your job is to select the word or phrase that best completes each blank so that the passage is coherent and logically consistent.
TC is roughly 25% of the Verbal Reasoning section. It is not a vocabulary quiz in isolation: every question fuses hard vocabulary with sentence logic. You cannot succeed by knowing definitions alone, and you cannot succeed by reasoning alone — you need both.
| Format | Blanks | Choices per blank | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Single-blank | 1 | 5 | Pick 1 of 5. Pure vocabulary-in-context. |
| Double-blank | 2 | 3 each | Pick 1 for each blank. 9 possible combinations. |
| Triple-blank | 3 | 3 each | Pick 1 for each blank. 27 possible combinations. |
This is the single most important scoring fact about multi-blank TC:
There is no partial credit. On a two- or three-blank question, you must get every blank right to earn the point. One wrong blank scores exactly the same as three wrong blanks: zero.
The consequence is strategic. On a triple-blank question you are effectively making three independent decisions that must all be correct. A 90%-per-blank hit rate collapses to about 73% (0.9 × 0.9 × 0.9) on the whole item. This is why disciplined method — not gut feeling — is what separates a 155 from a 165.
Unlike some tests, the GRE does not reward you for picking the "harder-sounding" word. Every blank has exactly one defensible answer, dictated by the surrounding text. If two choices both seem to fit, you have misread the logic — reread the signal words rather than guessing on connotation.
The vocabulary in GRE answer choices is graduate-level: words like recondite (obscure, hard to understand), tendentious (biased toward a particular view), jejune (naive or insipid), obdurate (stubborn), and perspicacious (keenly perceptive). You will meet several of these per section. Building a working knowledge of high-frequency GRE words is non-negotiable — but knowing the word is only half the battle. The other half, covered in the next lesson, is reading the sentence's logic before you ever look at the choices.