This page is part of my unofficial solutions manual to the GRE Paper Practice Book (2e), a free resource available on the ETS website. They publish the questions; I explain the answers. If you haven’t worked through the Practice Book, give Section 3 a shot before reading this!

3.12: Geese and Salt Marshes, pt. 1

Here, the phrase “most likely” puts us on notice that we’re looking for the best answer, rather than a single right answer. As in previous questions, we can simplify our work by eliminating any patently false answers, leaving only a subset of the answer choices for serious consideration. In tackling questions like this, I sometimes advise my students to think of the answers as contestants on a stage, competing for their attention. (Kennel Club? “GRE’s Got Talent?” You decide.) Removing the most obviously wrong answers makes the stage less crowded and gives them fewer contestants to judge between. Much of successful GRE prep — both Verbal and Math — involves this sort of cognitive load reduction.

The key to this particular question (and to 3.13, for that matter) is the observation that “the standard view” (line 14) is the same as the “widely held belief” in line 11. The “belief” is that the role of geese in marsh ecosystems is minimal. Does that (A) explain how geese can turn a salt marsh into a mudflat? No. Nor does it (B) summarize the events whereby marshes are turned into mudflats. In fact, the “belief” / “view” is challenged (C) by the author’s account of geese profoundly but indirectly influencing their ecosystem. Our rejection of the final two answer choices follows from our initial observation: the “standard view” doesn’t call the “belief” into question (D), or vice versa (E), because the “view” and the “belief” are one and the same.

This page is part of my unofficial solutions manual to the GRE Paper Practice Book (2e), a free resource available on the ETS website. They publish the questions; I explain the answers. If you haven’t worked through the Practice Book, give Section 3 a shot before reading this!

3.11: Civil and Criminal Law, pt. 3

With this question we’re back to looking for one right answer, the one thing that is “suggest[ed]” by the passage. For the most part, the procedure we developed in question 3.9 will serve us here as well. There is, however, one feature of these answer choices that bears special mention. Looking at (A), we can see that multiple conditions have to be met before we can accept it as our answer:

• the “widespread assumption” must be true (according to the author)
• civil law must be as relevant to social historians as to legal historians (again, according to the author)
• the “widespread assumption” must be the reason that civil law is relevant to social historians

If any one of these is incorrect, the answer choice as a whole must be incorrect too. (This “divide and conquer” approach, by the way, has been an implicit part of the explanations to problems 3.1-3.10, but here we can use it more explicitly.) Let’s start with the first point: is the “widespread assumption” true according to the passage author? No. The author raises the assumption in order to challenge it, which s/he does in lines 19ff by asserting that civil litigants in early modern England were both numerous and socially diverse. Because one part of the answer is wrong, we can reject the answer and move on.

Our reasoning process in rejecting (A) actually helps us to get started on (B), since we already know that the author believes the “widespread assumption” to be inaccurate. All that remains is to ask whether the author believes that civil legal history will be valuable to historians in general. To see that this is true, look at lines 17-19. There, the author suggests that civil legal history is seen as irrelevant because of this (inaccurate) assumption. So both parts of answer (B) are supported, which means it must be the correct answer.

In a real-exam context, we would mark “B” and move on; we wouldn’t waste valuable test time reviewing the other options. But since we’re not on the clock, we may as well survey the remaining answer choices and see what we can learn from them.

Answer (C) is (like some of the wrong answers in 3.10) a specious “remix” of interesting-sounding phrases from the text. We do hear briefly about the “male elite,” but the author doesn’t allude to any “data” about them, much less to the accuracy of such data. What s/he does refer to is recently-collected data about everyone else: the merchants, farmers, and so forth. For answer (D), note that the author raises the “assumption” as a “possible explanation […]” (lines 14ff), describing it in terms very close to those given in the answer choice. The author questions the accuracy of the assumption in the last third of the essay, but s/he does not question its influence on historians. Finally, for answer (E), it will suffice to observe that the “assumption” is based not on an “analogy” between civil and criminal law, but on a presumed difference between the two: supposedly, one involves people from all walks of life, while the other concerns only the wealthy and powerful.

This page is part of my unofficial solutions manual to the GRE Paper Practice Book (2e), a free resource available on the ETS website. They publish the questions; I explain the answers. If you haven’t worked through the Practice Book, give Section 3 a shot before reading this!

3.10: Civil and Criminal Law, pt. 2

In 3.9 I distinguished between questions with one right answer and questions with one best answer. This question is one of the latter, since the author may have multiple reasons for presenting the list of occupations in lines 19-23. When we’re assessing this type of question, one which concerns the author’s purpose, we want to ask of each answer choice:

• is this something the author was trying to do?
• was it their main purpose?

Here, for example, we can pick off answer choice (A) pretty quickly by asking the first question. Was the author trying to support the prevalent assumptions about the civil legal system? No; s/he was trying to critique them. Likewise, the author never advances a “theory” (B) that more people encountered civil than criminal law; s/he just says that many people encountered civil law. This, incidentally, is a classic type of incorrect GRE answer — an initially true statement is exaggerated to the point that it is no longer supportable. If the answer choice had read “support the theory that lots of people participated in the civil legal system,” it would have been correct. It’s that added comparison that kills it.

Answer choice (C) might seem to pass our first test, since the author does make a comparison between ordinary people and a “narrow, propertied, male elite.” But look again: neither the author, nor anyone else, is claiming that legal history has more to say about the ordinary people than about the elite. This is another common GRE trick: the wrong answer borrows closely from the wording of the passage, but introduces a comparison or judgment that is absent from the original text.

At this point, it’s looking pretty good for answer (D). Is the author trying to “illustrate” the wide social impact of civil law? Yes, and s/he does so not only in lines 19-23, but in the remainder of the passage as well. Is this the main point of listing out all of these Canterbury Tales characters? This, too, seems plausible. The author is saying, in effect, “Look at all these poor or middle-class people who used the civil legal system.”

But because this is a “best answer”-type question, we need to examine (E) before we commit to our answer choice. It should be clear that the author of the passage has no argument with the “recent research” s/he quotes, since no criticism of that research appears in the remaining lines of the passage. This leaves us free to accept answer (D) as the only remaining choice.

This page is part of my unofficial solutions manual to the GRE Paper Practice Book (2e), a free resource available on the ETS website. They publish the questions; I explain the answers. If you haven’t worked through the Practice Book, give Section 3 a shot before reading this!

3.9: Civil and Criminal Law, pt. 1

In order to answer Reading Comprehension questions efficiently, it helps to draw a basic distinction between two common question types:

• “find the right answer”
• “find the best answer”

The difference between “right” and “best” may seem like mere verbal gymnastics, but let me explain. In the first kind of question, we can basically evaluate every answer choice as a miniature “true/false” question: does the passage support this answer or not? Once we find an answer that is supported by the passage, our work is done; we don’t need to consider any more answer choices. Questions of this type often use phrases like “the passage suggests” or “according to the passage.”

In the second, more complicated case, we can’t simply declare the individual answer choices “true” or “false” and quit when we reach the one that makes sense. Instead, multiple answers may appear plausible, and we have to weigh the merits of each one — no skipping. Questions of this type tend to use phrases like “most likely” and “primarily.”

Question 3.9 is of the first, simpler type. “The passage suggests” only one of the five answers, and when we’ve found it, we’re done. The way to proceed is to try and find evidence that either supports or contradicts each answer choice. (If you can’t find any evidence either way, just move on to another answer choice for the time being.) We begin with answer choice (A). Does the passage imply that criminal law is of greater “intellectual interest?” No. In fact, this is one of the stereotypes that the passage sets out to disprove. Answer choice (B), on the other hand, is supported by the passage: lines 4ff lament the fact that historians don’t “focus” on civil law, and line 15 charges them with “neglect.” The implicit point of comparison for both remarks is criminal law, which is comparatively well studied.

On an actual exam, you’d stop here, having found the one right answer in the set of five. For thoroughness’s sake, though, let’s consider answers (C) through (E) as well. The notion that criminal law is “more relevant” than civil law (C), or that it affected more people (D), is something the passage argues against, especially in lines 19-27, where the author attempts to show the socially diverse group of people involved in civil proceedings.

(E) is a little trickier. Maitland (not the author of the passage) suggests that civil law “requires the mastery […],” but the passage author immediately retorts that this is true of criminal law as well (see ll. 10-14). This underscores the importance of being clear on “who said what” in a Reading Comp passage. Maitland’s views are at odds with those of the passage author, who quotes Maitland only in order to critique him.

Vocab Note

The words litigation and litigious are important to an understanding of this passage. Although litigation can refer to legal action of any kind, when the term is used by itself, it usually denotes a civil lawsuit rather than a criminal trial.  This fact helps to explain the meaning of litigious, which means “prone to settling arguments via lawsuits.” The United States is often regarded (even by its own citizens) as an especially litigious society, whereas Japan is sometimes upheld as an example of an especially non-litigious country.

This page is part of my unofficial solutions manual to the GRE Paper Practice Book (2e), a free resource available on the ETS website. They publish the questions; I explain the answers. If you haven’t worked through the Practice Book, give Section 3 a shot before reading this!

3.8: “If one could don magic spectacles …”

This question is more straightforward than the previous one — no cross-comparison or other special techniques required. In fact, your main obstacle in navigating this question will likely be the tendency to hear the text in the rich, avuncular voice of an IMAX documentary narrator. (If “avuncular” is unfamiliar, stop for a second and add it to your list of “Vocab Flash Cards to Make.” You are keeping one, right?)

We can see at a glance that none of the blanks logically depend on one another, as they did in 3.7. Instead, we can source each answer choice from the text separately, which greatly simplifies our task. For blank (i), consider what sort of person would benefit most from the magic time-travel glasses that the passage describes. A casual (A) observer is more likely to need this kind of help than is a clearheaded (C) observer. Whether or not someone is prescient (B) — that is, able to predict the future — seems to be a peripheral matter, since this question is about understanding the past.

Blank (ii) relies on parallelism, which you’ve grown accustomed to looking for in GRE verbal questions. In the sentence before the blank, we’re told that fish used to be “more abundant” in the oceans of centuries past, and “likewise” tells us to expect more of the same.” Of the three answer choices, only plentiful (E) means the same thing as “abundant”; the other choices more nearly mean its opposite.

Finally, for blank (iii), we have to consider why the narrator is offering us these glasses at all. The purpose of these fictive glasses is to clarify what has happened to the oceans in the past “several centuries,” revealing changes that we might not otherwise appreciate. Without the glasses, that is, we might not be able to discern (H) any meaningful difference. Note that, just as in question 3.5 (about George Bernard Shaw), we have two answers that are very close in meaning: here, ignore and dismiss. Although this fact, by itself, doesn’t conclusively rule out either answer, it should make us very doubtful that either one will be correct. (In the Sentence Equivalence format, modeled in questions 3.15ff, we will want pairs of answers that mean the same thing. Here, however, we can select only one answer choice per column, so pairs of near-synonymous answers should put us on our guard.)

This page is part of my unofficial solutions manual to the GRE Paper Practice Book (2e), a free resource available on the ETS website. They publish the questions; I explain the answers. If you haven’t worked through the Practice Book, give Section 3 a shot before reading this!

3.7: “There is nothing that …”

At first glance, three-column Text Completion (TC) questions seem to be much more difficult than their one- and two-column counterparts. While it’s true that they usually take longer to solve, these questions can be broken down step-by-step and attacked with the same techniques as the shorter TCs. What’s more, because these questions derive their difficulty mainly from their structure and their length, they will often (though not always) cut you a break on vocabulary. If you’re comfortable with the TC format but find yourself stumbling over unfamiliar words, you may even find the three-column questions easier to solve than some of the one-column questions, which can degenerate into “vocab salad.”

In this particular passage, we have two blanks — (i) and (iii) — that depend on one another for meaning; either both answers make sense, or neither does. Blank (ii) can be treated separately. To tackle the paired blanks, we cross-compare, considering each possible combination of answers for (i) and (iii). We might set up a chart like the one below to facilitate this process:

Now we need to think about how someone amazed (A) by a scientific breakthrough might react to the news. Would they show contempt (G) — meaning disrespect or dismissiveness? Probably not. How about indifference (H) or insincerity (I)? These don’t make much sense either; none of them describes the behavior of a person who is amazed. We can infer from this that amazes (A) can’t be the right answer, since none of the reactions in (iii) follow from it.

We then repeat the process with pleases (B), and we find pretty quickly that neither contempt (G), nor indifference (H), nor again insincerity (I) is the likely reaction of someone who is pleased with an outcome. So we can cross (B) off our list and conclude that the scientists must be nettled (C), meaning acutely annoyed or irritated, when outsiders step in and solve the problem they were working on. That leaves us with the question of which reaction — contempt (G), indifference (H), or insincerity (I) — best reflects a feeling of annoyance. It seems clear that contempt (G) is the winner here.

Finally, we turn back to the standalone blank (ii). It’s asking us, in effect, “What is the role of the first sentence of the passage?” Is it an exposition (D)? No, that would imply a detailed explanation, when what we’re actually given is a general statement about human nature. It’s not an objurgation (E), which is a harsh rebuke or criticism. This author may be gently critiquing the scientists for their unreceptiveness to ideas from outside their field, but s/he isn’t rebuking or scolding them as objurgate would imply. Thus, we have methodically confirmed what we probably already suspected — the first sentence is best described as an observation (F).

This page is part of my unofficial solutions manual to the GRE Paper Practice Book (2e), a free resource available on the ETS website. They publish the questions; I explain the answers. If you haven’t worked through the Practice Book, give Section 3 a shot before reading this!

3.6: “Although he has …”

In this passage and others like it, the logical relationship between the blanks counts for just as much as our knowledge of the vocabulary. Parallelism is, as always, a useful place to start. “Reputation” is just shorthand for “what people generally think,” so whatever we learn about one will apply to the other. We’re told that the man in this story is thought to be insolent (i.e., rude), so we can reasonably assume that blank (i) will mean “rudeness” or a closely related concept. Of the three answer choices, only one comes close: impudence (C), which is almost a synonym for insolence (but see Vocab Note below). Inscrutability (A) refers to being hard to understand or hard to make sense of. (If you have a friend who is so sarcastic that you can’t tell when they’re being serious, you have a reference point for this word.) A venal (B) person is corrupt or prone to bribery. This might, at first glance, sound like rude behavior, but bring it back to the compatibility test: a person can be extremely polite even while acting in a dishonest manner.

Now turn to blank (ii). The “although” at the beginning of the passage tells us that we’re looking for a contrast between this man’s actual behavior and his reputation. Since his reputation is for rudeness, his behavior must be polite, which is the meaning of courteous (E). Brazen (D) means “bold and shameless,” which is the opposite of what we want here. Predictable (F) is beside the point — a person can be predictably rude or predictably nice.

Vocab Notes

Although impudent and insolent both mean “rude,” they differ slightly in connotation, describing different types and degrees of rudeness. Generally speaking, someone who is impudent might also be described as sassy or cheeky. An insolent person, on the other hand, is arrogant and aloof in addition to being impolite, and their rudeness is seldom construed as amusing. Shakespeare fans will find in King Lear a contrast between these two personality traits: the Fool is cheerfully impudent, whereas Edmund is coldly insolent, increasingly so as the play wears on. For a more up-to-date point of reference, consider the early Harry Potter books/movies: Draco Malfoy is insolent, but the prankish Weasley brothers are better described as impudent.

This page is part of my unofficial solutions manual to the GRE Paper Practice Book (2e), a free resource available on the ETS website. They publish the questions; I explain the answers. If you haven’t worked through the Practice Book, give Section 3 a shot before reading this!

3.5: “A newly published …”

The parallelism here is a little less obvious than in 3.4, but we can still use context clues to cut the answer choices down to size.

The passage tells us that someone just wrote a book about Shaw, so it’s clear he isn’t being disregarded (C). And the biography is a laudatory (i.e., praiseful) one, so Shaw isn’t being disparaged (B) (insulted and belittled) either. That leaves discussed (A) as our only choice for blank (i).

For blank (ii), note that the “essence of [Shaw’s] personality” means the same thing as his “true self.” So if biographers fail to present this “essence,” they are likewise failing to capture Shaw’s “true self.” Consequently, we can say that Shaw’s “true self” is disappearing (D) rather than emerging (E) or coalescing (F).

Vocab Notes

Another reason for rejecting answers (E) and (F) is that they are too similar in meaning; since they can’t both be right, they must both be wrong. To say that Shaw’s “true self” emerges in a book is virtually the same as to say that it coalesces. Note that although the figurative meanings of these words are almost identical (both mean, essentially, “to appear”) their literal meanings are quite distinct. To emerge is to come out of something: a hedgehog emerges from its burrow. When something coalesces, it takes shape from a bunch of smaller elements: water droplets coalesce into a puddle. Because coalesce and emerge share a meaning, but are not exact synonyms, they are a great example of words that might be matched up correctly in the Sentence Equivalence question type.