Hi Everyone,

I promised myself that I'm going to try and read an article from the 'Economist' magazine everyday till early November as prep work prior to my official GMAT study. Knowing that my verbal skills are lacking, I need this opportunity.

So, I'm half way complete with the first article in last weeks' Economist and I am starting to realize that I'm seriously challenged with the articles. It's taken me 30 minutes to read half the article and actually understand it (Title: Could Asia really go to ward over these?).

Part of the problem with the article is that my vocabulary is seriously lacking. It seems like I have to pick up the dictionary after every sentence because of an unknown word to me. I don't use words like "inculcate", "nationalism", "affronted", "maritime", "vitriolic", etc...

Does this type of reading ever get easier? I'm sure it's not the same author writing these.

Because my vocabulary sucks, I'm stuck trying to decode the sentence, let alone comprehend the paragraph and find the main point. I'm also searching on google for background information on the history of China, Japan, and Germany because I find that I need to know it to understand where the author is coming from. Now, granted on the GMAT I won't have that luxury, could it possibly help my subject matter expertise/familiarity on the GMAT?

Question to all of you: Is this just me? Does the Economist provide a solid foundation to GMAT reading? Is what I'm doing right when it comes to picking up the dictionary to learn up unknown words or should I try to use context to uncover the definitions?