GRE Verbal Reasoning Sample Questions Set H

Categories: GRE (The Graduate Records Examination)

Directions for questions 16 and 17:

Each of the following questions includes a short text with a blank, indicating that something has been omitted. Select the entry that best completes the text.

Question.16. Far from viewing Jefferson as a skeptical but enlightened intellectual, historians of the 1960s portrayed him as _____ thinker, eager to fill the young with his political orthodoxy while censoring ideas he did not like.

A. an adventurous

B. a doctrinaire

C. an eclectic

D. a judicious

E. a cynical

Answer: (b)

Question.17. Dramatic literature often ______ the history of a culture in that it takes as its subject matter the important events that have shaped and guided the culture.

A. confounds

B. repudiates

C. recapitulates

D. anticipates

E. polarizes

Answer: (c)

Question 18 is based on the following text.

As an example of the devastation wrought on music publishers by the photocopier, one executive noted that for a recent choral festival with 1,200 singers, the festival’s organizing committee purchased

Line: only 12 copies of the music published by her company that was

    5: performed as part of the festival.

Question.18. Select and indicate the best answer from among the five answer choices:

Which of the following, if true, most seriously weakens the support the example lends to the executive’s contention that music publishers have been devastated by the photocopier?

A. Only a third of the 1,200 singers were involved in performing the music published by the executive’s company.

B. Half of the singers at the festival had already heard the music they were to perform before they began to practice for the festival.

C. Because of shortages in funding, the organizing committee of the choral festival required singers to purchase their own copies of the music performed at the festival.

D. Each copy of music that was performed at the festival was shared by two singers.

E. As a result of publicity generated by its performance at the festival, the type of music performed at the festival became more widely known.

Answer: (c)

Directions for questions 19 through 21:

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.19. New technologies often begin by (i)____ what has gone before, and they change the world later. Think how long it took power-using companies to recognize that with electricity they did not need to cluster their machinery around the power source, as in the days of steam. Instead, power could be (ii)_____ their processes. In that sense, many of today’s computer networks are still in the steam age. Their full potential remains unrealized.

Answer: (i) C, (ii) D

Question.20. There has been much hand-wringing about how unprepared American students are for college. Graff reverses this perspective, suggesting that colleges are unprepared for students. In his analysis, the university culture is largely (i)______ entering students because academic culture fails to make connections to the kinds of arguments and cultural references that students grasp. Understandably, many students view academic life as (ii)_____ ritual.

Answer: (i) B, (ii) D

Question.21. Of course anyone who has ever perused an unmodernized text of Captain Clark’s journals knows that the Captain was one of the most (i)_______ spellers ever to write in English, but despite this (ii)_______ orthographical rules, Clark is never unclear.

Answer: (i) C, (ii) D