GRE Audio Books

Ben Jonson’s “To Penshurst” is a classic example of an estate poem, a term the GRE Literature may want you to know. This form, which became fashionable in the 17th century, describes a landscape attached to a noble house and typically becomes a meditation upon the relationships between nature & culture. Here’s the opening- read the full text of “To Penshurst” here.

TO PENSHURST.

Thou art not, PENSHURST, built to envious show
Of touch, or marble ; nor canst boast a row
Of polish’d pillars, or a roof of gold :
Thou hast no lantern whereof tales are told ;
Or stair, or courts ; but stand’st an ancient pile,
And these grudg’d at, art reverenced the while.
Thou joy’st in better marks, of soil, of air,
Of wood, of water ; therein thou art fair.
Thou hast thy walks for health, as well as sport :
Thy mount, to which thy Dryads do resort, 10
Where Pan and Bacchus their high feasts have made,
Beneath the broad beech, and the chestnut shade ;
That taller tree, which of a nut was set,
At his great birth, where all the Muses met.

As an addendum to the usual order of things, I wanted to call your attention to a program I just discovered, one which may prove very useful in enhancing your vocabulary for the GRE literature and general tests. It’s called the Mnemosyne Project, and it makes use of algorithms and current research on memory and learning efficiency to present flash cards in an order that will help you to remember them. And yes, they have a flash card program of 700 difficult GRE vocab words. Here’s how they describe it:

Efficient learning

The Mnemosyne software resembles a traditional flash-card program to help you memorise question/answer pairs, but with an important twist: it uses a sophisticated algorithm to schedule the best time for a card to come up for review. Difficult cards that you tend to forget quickly will be scheduled more often, while Mnemosyne won’t waste your time on things you remember well.

The software runs on Linux, Windows and Mac OS X.
Memory research

While you use the software, detailed statistics can be kept on your learning process. If you want, these logs can be uploaded in a transparent and anonymous way to a central server for analysis.

This data will be valuable to study the behaviour of our memory over a very long time period. As an additional benefit, the results will be used to improve the scheduling algorithms behind the software even further.

I haven’t tried it yet, but it sounds pretty fascinating. It’s also open source, which is always nice.
You can read more about it, download the program and get the GRE vocabulary flash cards here.