Another new question type in the new GRE (revised) to be released in August 2011 is called sentence highlighting. That’s not really an “official” name, but it does describe what you need to do to answer the question. Sentence highlighting questions are a new type of question used to test your reading comprehension skills.

We’re all familiar with the standard multiple-choice reading comprehension question: Given a passage (usually about the world’s most boring topic), choose the correct answer from four or five options. At this point in your life, regardless of your background, you’ve probably had to do what feels like millions of them; If you’ve ever taken a test preparation course like Testmasters, you probably also know that the basic principle for answering these questions is to “justify your answer with evidence directly from the text.” If you can’t find a sentence in the passage to support your answer, then it can’t be correct.

Well, the ETS has decided to take this concept to a literal level: find a sentence in the passage that answers the question and highlight it.

Let’s see an example.

Recently, some scientists have concluded that meteorites found on Earth and long believed to be of Martian origin may actually have been released from Martian gravity by the impact of other meteorites on Mars. This conclusion has led to another question: whether meteorite impacts on Earth have brought rocks from this planet to Mars in a similar way.

According to astronomer SA Phinney, kicking a rock hard enough to free it from Earth’s gravity would require a meteorite capable of creating a crater more than 60 miles across. Furthermore, even if rocks on Earth were released by a meteorite impact, Mars’s orbit is much larger than Earth’s, so Phinney estimates the probability of these rocks hitting Mars to be about one tenth. part of the probability of rocks from Mars hitting Earth. To prove this estimate, Phinney used a computer to calculate where 1,000 hypothetical particles would go if they were ejected from Earth in random directions. He found that 17 of the 1,000 particles would hit Mars.

Select the sentence that explains how the meteorites found on Earth could have come from Mars.

The first sentence of the passage explains that “meteorites found on Earth… may actually have been released from Mars gravity by the impact of other meteorites on Mars.” Therefore, the answer is the first sentence; we would mouse over this sentence and click on the sentence (any part of it) to highlight it, then send our response.

Since the GRE is a computerized test, you don’t actually have to bring a highlighter to the test center. All you have to do is click on (any part of) the sentence that contains your answer, and the entire sentence will automatically be highlighted. The idea seems somewhat unusual at first, but it’s really no different from the reading comprehension questions you’re used to. As with multiple choice questions, you simply need to find the sentence in the passage that directly answers the question, except now you literally have to go and do it!