GRE Verbal Reasoning Sample Questions Set B

Categories: GRE (The Graduate Records Examination)

Questions 8 through 11 are based on the following reading passage.

In the 1970s, two debates engaged many scholars of early United States history. One focused on the status of women, primarily White women. Turning on the so-called golden age

Line:  theory, which posited that during the eighteenth-century colonial

    5: era, American women enjoyed a brief period of high status relative to their English contemporaries and to nineteenth-century American women, this debate pitted scholars who believed women’s lives deteriorated after 1800 against those who thought women’s lives had been no better before 1800. At issue were the causes of

 10: women’s subordination: were these causes already in place when the English first settled North America or did they emerge with the rise of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism? The second debate, the so-called origins debate, concerned the emergence of racial slavery in the southern colonies: was slavery the inevitable result

 15: of the deep-rooted racial prejudice of early British colonists or did racial prejudice arise only after these planters instituted slave labor?

             Although these debates are parallel in some respects, key differences distinguished them. Whereas the debate over women’s status revolved around implicit comparisons of colonial women to

 20: their counterparts in the antebellum period (1800-1860), thus inviting comment from scholars of both historical periods, the origins debate was primarily confined to a discussion about slavery in colonial America. Second, in contrast to the newness of the debate over women’s status and its continued currency throughout

 25: the early 1980s, the debate over race and slavery, begun in the 1950s, had lost some of its urgency with the publication of Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom (1975), widely regarded as the last word on the subject.

            Each debate also assumed a different relationship to the groups

 30: whose histories it concerned. In its heyday, the origins debate focused mainly on White attitudes toward Africans rather than on Africans themselves. With few exceptions, such as Wood’s Black Majority (1974) and Mullin’s Flight and Rebellion (1972), which were centrally concerned with enslaved African men, most works

 35: pertaining to the origins debate focused on the White architects, mostly male, of racial slavery. In contrast, although women’s historians were interested in the institutions and ideologies contributing to women’s subordination, they were equally concerned with documenting women’s experiences. As in the

 40: origins debate, however, early scholarship on colonial women defined its historical constituency narrowly, women’s historians focusing mainly on affluent White women.

              Over time, however, some initial differences between the approaches taken by scholars in the two fields faded. In the 1980s,

 45: historians of race and slavery in colonial America shifted their attention to enslaved people; interest in African American culture grew, thereby bringing enslaved women more prominently into view. Historians of early American women moved in similar directions during the decade and began to consider the effect of

 50: racial difference on women’s experience.

Question.8. Select and indicate the best answer from among the five answer choices:

        The passage is primarily concerned with

A. showing how historians who were engaged in a particular debate influenced historians engaged in another debate

B. explaining why two initially parallel scholarly debates diverged in the 1980s

C. comparing two scholarly debates and discussing their histories

D. contrasting the narrow focus of one scholarly debate with the somewhat broader focus of another

E. evaluating the relative merits of the approaches used by historians engaged in two overlapping scholarly debates

Answer: (c)

Question.9. Select and indicate the best answer from among the five answer choices:

It can be inferred that the author of the passage mentions American Slavery, American Freedom in the second paragraph (line 27) primarily in order to

A. substantiate a point about the methodology that came to be prevalent among scholars engaged in the origins debate

B. cite a major influence on those scholars who claimed that racial prejudice preceded the institution of slavery in colonial America

C. show that some scholars who were engaged in the origins debate prior to the 1980s were interested in the experiences of enslaved people

D. identify a reason for a certain difference in the late 1970s between the origins debate and the debate over American women’s status

E. contrast the kind of work produced by scholars engaged in the origins debate with the kind produced by scholars engaged in the debate over American women’s status

Answer: (d)

Question.10. Select and indicate the best answer from among the five answer choices:

The passage suggests which of the following about the women’s historians mentioned in the third paragraph?

A. They disputed certain claims regarding the status of eighteenth-century American women relative to women in England during the same period.

B. Their approach to the study of women’s subordination had been partly influenced by earlier studies published by some scholars engaged in the origins debate.

C. Their work focused on the experiences of both White and African American women.

D. Their approach resembled the approach taken in studies by Wood and by Mullin in that they were interested in the experiences of people subjected to a system of subordination.

E. To some extent, they concurred with Wood and with Mullin about the origins of racism in colonial America.

Answer: (d)

Question.11. Select and indicate the best answer from among the five answer choices:

According to the passage, historical studies of race and slavery in early America that were produced during the 1980s differed from studies of that subject produced prior to the 1980s in that the studies produced during the 1980s

A. gave more attention to the experiences of enslaved women

B. gave less attention to the cultures of enslaved people

C. were read by more scholars in other fields

D. were more concerned with the institutions and ideologies that perpetuated racial prejudice in postcolonial America

E. made direct comparisons between the subordination of White women and the subordination of African American people

Answer: (a)

Directions for questions 12 through 17:

Each of the following questions includes a short text with two or three blanks, each blank indicating that something has been omitted. Select one entry for each blank from the corresponding column of choices. Fill all blanks in the way that best completes the text.

Question.12. The narratives that vanquished peoples have created of their defeat have, according to Schivelbusch, fallen into several identifiable types. In one of these, the vanquished manage to (i) _______the victor’s triumph as the result of some spurious advantage, the victors being truly inferior where it counts. Often the winners (ii) _______ this interpretation, worrying about the cultural or moral costs of their triumph and so giving some credence to the losers’ story.

Answer: Blank (i) A,   (ii) F

Question. 13.  I’ve long anticipated this retrospective of the artist’s work, hoping that it would make (i)____judgments about him possible, but greater familiarity with his paintings highlights their inherent (ii)__________ and actually makes one’s assessment (iii) __________.

Answer: Blank (i) B,   (ii) E, (iii) G