Vocab Manager for GRE - learning Barons' 3500 new words in 2 months !

THE BIG ADVANTAGE of the Vocab Manager over traditional methods of preparing for CAT or GRE word-lists and improving your vocabulary. The claim is that the learning rate using this package can be anywhere from 4 to 10 times faster than in the traditional methods. This is especially true in an environment where you simply don't have the time to study. A small period of 30 minutes to one hour everyday on this test is equi- valent to 2 to 5 hours of on-paper preparation. If you don't believe it TRY IT ! Infact you are advised NOT TO give this test for more than 1 hour per day, or else you will learn so fast that you may not be able to retain all of that it in the long run. This does not imply that the retention power is less. What is meant is that 30 minutes to 1 hour is more than enough completes your learning.Infact the inbuilt expert system monitors your performance in such a way that you retain maximum of what you learn, by giving more attention to what you don't know while at the same time revising optimally what you already know or have picked up.

Advantages over traditional methods

• It keeps track of what words you know and what you don't helping you to avoid wasting time in finding out that.
• You don't have to make your own flash cards. Thus this software also takes care of OPTIMIZING your flash cards to a level you can never dream of achieving in manually made cards. It modifies the sequence after every test and only the most difficult words of the thousands come in the top 100 and next 100 as the next 100 in the generated flash -cards. So YOU NEED to give only 200-300 words per day. And the unused words will automatically churn up with time just like boiling water and the known ones will go down as silt. And this cycle will repeat after each test you give. Infact you yourself will start noticing this after giving the tests 7-8 times. The words coming in the start will start becoming more and more tough for you and the later ones are easier. So you see,the software takes care of not forgetting the words you have forgotten by bringing them up in the priority. Don't forget to generate a new file for the flash-cards whenever you take a new printout of the flash-cards file. For the test it is advised that when you have started using this test a bit regulary and you have reached a level where your scores are close to 100 %, you can stop giving the test after N quest- ions if you stop loosing marks after a certain no. of questions say 100 and don't loose any further marks for say the next 100 questions.
• Flash card sequence changes and prevents you from memorizing the sequence.
• The software monitors your performance by storing your responses as a database in the file GRE.DAT. The future sequence of the words is determined by the level of difficulty of each word. Since it is not possible to give a test of 1200 or more words at one strech, more difficult words come first.
• A paperless method; and one you can use in office anytime. Alt-D comma- nd provides you control over stopping from your Project Manager coming in between and catching you unawares.
• You yourself know how much Barons is known to you as a percentage which you can see improving day by day.
• Timing is important, try giving the test very fast. It will help you learn faster, save your time, and improve your speed. 2-3 seconds per question should be your speed when you become good.
• Your score should reach close to 99.5 % in 2 months, if you give 30 minutes everyday.

• WL.HLP is this help file.
• WL.EXE is the executable.
• WL.DCT is the dictionary containing the word-list from Baron's guide
• WL.DAT is a database which helps the GRE program to monitor your vocabulary as you learn.
• WL.PRE, WL.SUF, WL.ORG are files which are useful for searching for prefixes, suffixes and origin of words in Barons. ( you don't need to use this normally
• You can generate a set of YOUR unknown words for practice using the "U" option. It creates a file called WL.PRN.
• You can take a print-out of the WL.PRN file generated, fold the page in the middle and use it as flash cards for practice.The words will be in decreasing order of difficulty ( difficulty according to your past performance). That is the starting words in this flash-card will be tougher for you than the later ones. The best part is after some more days of practice, you can generate a fresh WL.PRN which will have a new sequence of words depending on your improved performance.

Options in the software

• hOnline help, showing this help file.
• tn Its a normal test with 4 choices. It is advised that you take this test only to measure your knowledge of recoginzing words for a gen eral idea of your current level and not for practicing and improving your performance. The choices are entered as 1/2/3/4 of your keyboard.
• th Its a "hidden-test". It does not show you the meaning of the word and asks you to guess the meaning of the word. Guess it. Now press any key. The meaning of the word will be visible now. If you find you had guessed the word meaning correctly enough, press a "y" key else press "n". If you failed to guess, note the meaning of the word.
• u Use this to generate the flash card.
• Alt-D If you want to break the test in between and still keep the current clock and state of the test to stop temporarily, press Alt-D. You will go to Dos prompt. Any time you can return to the test at the same point by typing exit at the point. Even after 1 hour the test will come back at the same point.
• Esc Press Esc key to stop the test.
• pwYou can search for a word in the dictionary by giving any part of of the word. Press Esc to go back to the main menu. All words having the prefix will appear. Note, since the older version can load only 865 words, so words will come only from the first 865 words in the dictionary file WL.DCT.Press Esc to return to main menu. Press Enter key to go back to the prefix list.
• pmYou can search for a word related to say water or anger or anything else by giving a part of the meaning. All words having meanings in the dictionary containg that string will be listed.
• peA list of prefixes as given in Barons Guide and their meanings. You can scroll and select the desired prefix and press Enter key.
• poFor suffixes and related words. Same as above.
• prFor origin/root of words. Same as above. May not be entirely correct as some of the roots appearing in words may be spurious.

• Total no. of questions appears in a red box.
  
• Total test time availabe to you = No. of Questions X 10 seconds.
  
• Time allowed per question is 10 seconds.
  
• The timer on the top-right also shows the average time in seconds that you have taken per question up till now, since starting the current test session.
  
• If you are behind time, ie. you have taken more than 10 seconds per question a waring beep signal starts coming in the back-ground and you can only stop it by bringing your average time down to less than 10 seconds. A Behind Time message also starts flashing with the timer.
  
• A timer shows the time remaing for the test ( for all the 1200 or so words)
  
• You can stop the test any time.
  
• Your performance for as many questions as you answered is used to monitor you.
  
• Your current score both in percentage, and in how many questions out of how many questions answered correctly appears on the top left in a blue window.
  
• Only a score of 50 % or more in the normal test and 30 % or more in the hidden test, and a minimum no. of questions answered qualifies the result to be used for updating the monitoring database WL.DAT
  
• The test paper, question sequence and choices don't repeat in the next test.
• choice "U" in the main menu lists you words as you know them up till now, the difficult words appearing first. This info. comes from WL.DAT file. The flash-cards are generated in that sequence.

• VV verb
• AD adjective
• NN general nown, for a person or an object
• SN special nouns like art of, science of.
• AN abstract(qualitative) nouns or nouns sounding like an adjective.

The meaning should be not very long. If it is too long, loading will give a parse error and position of the error, go and rectify it in WL.DCT, any extra spaces at the end, wrong format, or too long a meaning can cause this problem.

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