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.