Another new type of question on 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 have to do to answer the question. Sentence highlighting questions are a new type of question used to assess your reading comprehension skills.

We’re 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. At this point in your life, whatever 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, then you probably also know that the basic principle for answering these questions is “justify your answer with evidence directly from the text!” If you can’t find a sentence in the passage that supports your answer, then it can’t be correct.

Well, ETS has decided to take this concept to a literal level – look for a sentence in the passage that answers the question and highlights.

Let’s look at an example.

Recently, some scientists have come to the conclusion that meteorites found on Earth and long believed to have a Martian origin could actually have been released from the gravity of Mars 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 with enough force to free it from Earth’s gravity would require a meteor capable of creating a crater more than 60 miles in diameter. Furthermore, even if rocks on Earth were released by a meteorite impact, the orbit of Mars is much larger than Earth’s, so Phinney estimates that the probability of these rocks hitting Mars is roughly one tenth that of rocks on Mars hitting Earth. To demonstrate 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 … could actually have been released from the gravity of Mars by the impact of other meteorites on Mars.” Therefore, the answer is the first sentence; we would navigate our mouse over this sentence and click on the sentence (any part of it) to highlight it, then we would send our answer.

Since the GRE is a computerized exam, you don’t actually need 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 it will automatically highlight the entire sentence. The whole idea seems somewhat 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!