How to Study GRE Quantitative Reasoning: a 98-Card Glossary and the Format Numbers to Update

The GRE Quantitative Reasoning deck on Flip It (deck code IE2145, 98 cards) is not a problem set. There is not a single worked question in it. What it is — and this is more useful than it sounds in week one — is a glossary of every term ETS can put in front of you, plus the logistics of the test itself. Knowing instantly what parity, interquartile range or analytic geometry means is the difference between reading a question once and reading it three times.

Verify the format cards first

A handful of cards describe the pre-2023 exam. Fix them before you build a pacing plan around them:

Everything else in the logistics set still holds: scores of 130–170 in 1-point increments, a floor of 130 even with nothing correct, scores valid 5 years, five attempts per year with 21 days between them, an on-screen calculator, free movement backwards and forwards inside a section, and section-level adaptation — your first quant section sets the difficulty of the second, not your answer to each question. The percentile cards are worth memorising as targets: 170 sits at the 96th percentile, 160 at the 72nd, 150 at the 36th.

The glossary that carries the deck

Roughly sixty cards define the tested vocabulary, and the enumeration is genuinely complete: integers, divisibility, remainders, prime numbers, parity, exponentiation, nth roots, absolute value, estimation, ratios, rates, percentages, sequences; expressions, relations, functions, zeros of a function, equations and equation solving, factorisation, inequalities, linear equations, systems of linear equations, quadratic equations, slope, y-intercept, analytic geometry; parallel and perpendicular lines, circles, isosceles and equilateral triangles, special right triangles, the Pythagorean theorem, quadrilaterals, polygons, polyhedra, congruence, similarity, perimeter, area, volume; mean, median, mode, range, standard deviation, quartiles, interquartile range, percentiles, frequency, scatter plots, box plots, line, bar and pie charts, probability, conditional probability, independence, random variables, probability distributions, the normal distribution, combinations, permutations and Venn diagrams.

Two cards you should write yourself

Put the numbers back into the geometry. The deck defines a special right triangle as one "with predictable side ratios" and never gives the ratios. Add them: 45-45-90 is 1 : 1 : √2, and 30-60-90 is 1 : √3 : 2. Do the same for the normal distribution card, which defines the shape but omits the 68-95-99.7 split that data-analysis questions are built on.

Define quantitative comparison properly. It is the most GRE-specific question type on the test and appears in exactly one card, as a count. Write a card for the four fixed answer choices — quantity A greater, quantity B greater, the two equal, relationship cannot be determined — and one for the rule that follows from them: when both quantities contain only numbers and no variables, "cannot be determined" is never the answer. That single card eliminates a choice on every comparison you see.

Find the deck under code IE2145 in the Flip It library at flip-it.app. The vocabulary half of the exam is covered in Master 541 GRE High-Frequency Words, and the near-twin deck for the other exam is broken down in the GMAT Quantitative study guide.