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.)