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.