Considerations on responses and responding

I have two observations regarding my performance on the GRE practice exams.  Both relate to my current pattern of answering, and the sorts of answers that the GRE provides as options.

First, I am having a more difficult time with the sentence equivalences and the fill in the blanks.  My problem seems to stem from the fact that I do not know the meaning of the words being provided.  For instance, take a look at the following list.  Without exception, I stumbled on all of these words.

• Clement
• Meet
• Condign
• Jocund
• Recondite
• Metonym 
• Homonym 
• Pugnacious 
• Stalwart
• Doughty 
• Intractable 
• Opprobrious
• Invective
• Beguile 
• Cloying 
• Cant 
• Plaintive
• Arresting 
• Attracting 
• Intriguing 

Compounding the problem is the fact that two words provided by GRE questions (if Kaplan's practice sets are of any reliability) can typically be eliminated, which leaves three answer choices that are similar in meaning, but not exact synonyms.  Of course, there are never two "exact" synonyms since then we'd just have the same word, and that would be inefficient, and language is an efficiency system, but the problem remains: there are three words, with subtle differences, and a course lexicaliztation of the words is problematic.  My suggestion for myself (and others if they bother reading) is to concentrate on a method of differentiating the almost synonyms.  One idea that has been suggested is to categorize words in terms of their negative and positive connotations.  I've begun doing this, but I'm not at no Major Najjar point in my study.  Kudos to you, Major.

The second problem that I am confronting, or rather pattern in responding and responses, is found on the GRE reading comprehension questions.  There's usually one or two questions that ask for an inference to the best conclusion.  On these questions, it's typically quite easy to eliminate three of the responses, which leaves us with two.  The problem, and pattern, is that I am reading the responses, and going with the intuitive appeal of one over the other.  I don't have time to waste reasoning through the details of a thick passage on Einstein's theory of relativity or the correlation of pollution rates in cities that house pharmaceutical manufacturing plants.  But, it turns out that my intuition is typically wrong.  I can't bring myself to answer contrary to my intuition on these questions, because....well....what if I turn out right?  I'd much rather get something wrong based on following my intuition, than get something right because I followed an algorithm of answering contrary to my intuition.  For starters, won't this develop in myself a mistrust of my intuition, and won't this strategy impede the experimentation process, which I take to be a process of testing intuitions?  Still, though, the appeal of getting another question right by rebelling against my intuition is strong, and I think on the next few tests, I will run contrary to my intuition and test the strategy.  It just may be the case that I'm wrong about all this, but if I'm right, and it can land me into a graduate program, I'll bite the bullet and say my intuition is typically in difficult circumstances like these, distracted.

So, without wasting any more time reasoning about my pattern of responses, I'm going to define the terms I got wrong.

Coming up in the next day or so is the strict, strict schedule I need to stick to.  32 more days til test time.