Another new type of question in the new (revised) GRE that will be released in August 2011 is called sentence highlighting. That’s not really an “official” name, but it describes 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 are all familiar with the standard multiple-choice reading comprehension question: given a passage (on the most boring topic in the world, usually), choose the correct answer from four or five options. By 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 prep course like Testmasters, you probably also know that the basic principle for answering these questions is to “justify your answer with evidence straight from the text.” If you cannot find a sentence in the passage that supports your answer, then it cannot 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 Mars’ gravity by the impact of other meteorites on Mars. This conclusion has led to another question: whether meteorite impacts on Earth have carried 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 in diameter. Furthermore, even if Earth’s rocks were released by a meteorite impact, Mars’ orbit is much larger than Earth’s, so Phinney estimates that the probability of these rocks hitting Mars is about one-tenth. part of the probability that rocks from Mars will hit 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 discovered that 17 of the 1,000 particles would hit Mars.

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

The first sentence of the passage explains that “meteorites found on Earth…might actually have been released from the gravity of Mars by the impact of other meteorites on Mars.” Therefore, the answer is first prize; we would hover our mouse over this sentence and click on the sentence (any part of it) to highlight it, then submit 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 a bit unusual at first, but it’s actually 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!