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!

3.20: Olfactory Adaptation, pt. 1

As usual, we begin by asking whether this question requires us to find a single right answer or to choose the best answer from an array of potentially viable options. The lack of comparative language here (no “most,” “best,” or “primarily”) tells us that we’re looking at the first type of question.

In order to evaluate these answer choices efficiently, we need to find the place in the passage that tells us about “reexposure […] after an extended absence.” Both of these key terms are used in lines 7-10, where we’re informed that the odor continues to be perceived as less intense even after a long absence. This rules out answer (A), which is the opposite of what the passage says, and it confirms (B) as our winner. We’d stop right here on a real exam, but for now we can note that (C) and (D) also contradict the information in lines 7-10. Answer (E) is (no pun intended) a red herring: other forms of sensory adaptation are briefly mentioned at the beginning of the passage, but that’s the last we hear about them.

Vocab Notes

Even if you weren’t familiar with the word olfactory beforehand, you probably worked out from context that it means “having to do with the sense of smell.” By itself this isn’t too remarkable — we use context clues in reading all the time — but it illustrates a useful principle for GRE Verbal problem solving. Reading Comp passages are drawn from a wide variety of subjects and disciplines, and they will often contain words that are specific to those disciplines. Since very few people have taken coursework — let alone majored or minored — in all the subjects they see on the GRE, you will sooner or later have to fall back on this kind of contextual reasoning. The thing to remember is that if these technical terms are required to solve a question, they will be defined, implicitly or explicitly, within the passage.

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!

3.19: “The detective’s conviction …”

This question illustrates another Verbal Reasoning pitfall: the temptation to assume information that seems to fit a scenario, but isn’t provided by the text. Here, we’re given a single sentence about a detective and her suspects, a scenario that practically begs us to “fill in” with stereotypes from movies, literature, and television. Resist that impulse, and focus on the bare facts presented in the text. All we know for certain is that the detective thinks there are “few inept crimes” under her jurisdiction. From that, the most cautious inference we can make — the one that involves the fewest assumptions from outside — is that the detective thinks her suspects are not inept.  Since inept means “unskilled or clumsy,” this would mean that the detective thinks her suspects possess “some degree of skill.”

Of our answer choices, the two closest in meaning to “skill” are acumen (B), which means “sound judgment,” and shrewdness (D), which means “cleverness.” The other four choices, which cast the suspect as dishonest or shifty, are probably more intuitively appealing to most test takers, whose expectations about detectives are primed by CSI and Sherlock Holmes. But that’s the trap: as much as we might be tempted to infer it, nothing in the text tells us that the detective believes her suspects to be dishonest.

Vocab Notes

The four incorrect answer choices in this question all have to do with dishonesty or deception in some way. Evasive (E) means “cagey and indirect,” though not dishonest per se. To equivocate (F) is to speak evasively or ambiguously in the hopes of misleading someone, such as by withholding key facts — telling “the truth,” but not “the whole truth.” (Equivocation reached the status of an art form in early modern England, where it was held to be morally preferable to lying.) Deceit (A) and duplicity (C) both mean “dishonest trickery.”

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!

3.18: “Although the film …”

How can we describe the films of today as they relate to the unnamed 1940 film in the text? The older film, we’re told, influenced critics’ opinions about cinema, indirectly helping later films to be taken more seriously. As a result, we might say that today’s films benefited from or owe something to the 1940 film.  Both beholden to (A) and indebted to (B) capture this idea (with beholden being a synonym for indebted or obligated). The next two answer choices, derivative (C) and based on (D), may seem attractive. They go too far, though: we don’t know whether the new films borrow anything from the older one in terms of style, technique, story, etc. We only know that critics paid attention to the older film, setting into motion a kind of ripple effect that has benefited today’s films too. Finally, distinguishable (E) and biased (F) are the opposite of what we want, calling attention to what separates the films of different eras instead of explaining what they have in common.

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!

3.17: “In medieval philosophy …”

Our big clue here is the presumption of a “determinate cause” — something fixed and defined that accounts for any given phenomenon. The blank represents something that is excluded by this way of thinking, something that must be the opposite of a “determinate cause.” Possible fill-ins thus include indeterminacy (remember, you don’t need to get creative with these) and randomness.

Of the six answer choices, the only two answers that fit this set of meanings are happenstance (A) and chance (B). If you approached this question synonyms-first, you might be tempted to choose error (C) and miscalculation (F), but consider that a mistake can be predetermined rather than random. The fate of the Mars Climate Orbiter provides a case in point: the spacecraft disintegrated in the Martian atmosphere due to a unit conversion error, a mistake that was written into the ground control software.

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!

3.16: “By about age eight …”

Here we want to know what kind of ability allows a child to pick up a new language so accurately. Note, though, that we’re also told that the child’s phonetic capabilities are “fully developed,” so any word that means “undeveloped” or “underdeveloped” won’t work here. Some options we might come up with (before looking at the answers!) include flexible, adaptable, changeable.

Now, to the answers: does plastic (A) mean flexible or changeable? You bet it does. Sometimes my students reject this word out of hand because they are unfamiliar with the original sense of the word plastic, which meant “capable of being shaped or molded” long before it denoted credit cards or grocery bags. (See Vocab Note below.) If this one tripped you up, just be aware that this is a classic GRE trick: using an unfamiliar sense of a familiar word. Something vestigial (B) is a small or non-functional trace of a previous thing, especially of an earlier stage in evolution or development. (The wings of the kiwi are vestigial.) Since the abilities here are “fully developed” and quite powerful, it doesn’t make sense to call them vestigial.

The next three answers — (C), (D), and (E) — are a kind of attention check, since all three mean “undeveloped” in one way or another. Inarticulate (C) means “unable to speak clearly,” and nascent (E) means “just beginning to exist.” But all three are contradicted by the information that the traits in question are “fully developed.” That leaves malleable (F) as the only remaining choice. The word means “easy to shape or influence” and thus matches up closely with plastic as it is used here.

Vocab Notes

Before the widespread use of polymers like PVC and polystyrene, plastic had the meaning given above: “capable of being shaped or molded.” In fact, the materials we know as plastics got their name because they have just that property: they can be molded, pressed, or extruded into a given shape. To help you associate this original meaning of plastic with its more recent sense, you might think of The Plastics, the popular clique in Mean Girls. The scriptwriters may have chosen the word plastic because the three girls behave in a fake and superficial way, like a plastic imitation of real friends. But remember that The Plastics — Gretchen, Karen, and eventually protagonist Cady — also “mold and shape” their behavior in order to stay on Regina’s good side and remain in the clique.

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!

3.15: “The slower-learning monkeys …”

First, a word about technique: in Sentence Equivalence (SE), our goal is to identify two words with similar meanings that make sense in the context of the sentence. It might seem that the best way to do this is to focus on the “similar meanings” criterion, pairing off any synonyms or near-synonyms we can find in the answer list. In practice, this exercise is a waste of time: the harder the SE question, the more likely there are to be multiple synonym pairs — but only one pair will be the correct answer. In some SE problems, all six of the words can be matched up, for a total of three pairs: this is a lot of work, and it won’t necessarily pay off. Instead, the best way to tackle these questions is the way you tackle a single-column Text Completion: cover up the answer choices and figure out the meaning of the blank, then compare the answers one-by-one to the meaning you came up with. Select the two that make the most sense, and you’ll almost always find that they are nearly synonymous.

This problem makes use of parallelism in the same way a Text Completion question might. (3.4 gives an especially good illustration of this feature.) Two independent clauses are separated by a colon, and Clause 2 basically reinforces what is said in Clause 1. This means that we just need to match up the important pieces of each clause to figure out what goes in the blank. Clause 1 tells us two things: the monkeys are [blank], and the monkeys are unintelligent. Clause 2 provides support for both of these statements. We know they are unintelligent because they looked only in “obvious” locations; we know they are [blank] because they “worked closely together.” It follows that the trait described in the blank must mean something like “working together.”

Now that we know what we’re looking for, we bring in the contestants. A competitive (A) attitude is the opposite of working together. Impulsiveness (B) is beside the point: people (or, presumably, monkeys) can be impulsive and still help each other, or they can be impulsive while getting in each other’s way. But cooperatively (C) closely matches our target meaning of “working together.” We should hold onto it and look for a match.

The next two answer choices, apart from having little to do with cooperation or competition, are incorrect because they contradict other information from the text. A devious (D) person (or monkey) is cunning and deceptive, and crafty (E) means approximately the same thing: neither one is compatible with the text’s description of the monkeys as unintelligent. This means that answer choice (F), harmoniously, must be our other correct answer.

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!

3.14: Corruption in City Hall

This is our first example of a question format I like to call “Same, Worse, or Better.” In these questions, the goal is to find out which answer weakens an argument the most — or, in some later questions, strengthens it the most. (You can see from the comparative language that we’re looking for the best answer choice, rather than a single right answer.) The way we’ll play it is to sort the answers into three simple groups:

• those that have no clear effect either way
• those that weaken the argument
• those that strengthen the argument

Only one group — “Weaken” or “Strengthen,” depending on the question — will be worth further consideration, and this group will usually contain only one or two answer choices. In this case, we’re looking for answer choices in the “Weaken” pile; if we’re lucky, we’ll only end up with one such answer, and no further work will be necessary.

First, though, we need to be crystal clear as to what the argument is. In this question, it’s pretty easy to find, but we need to have it in advance so that the answer choices don’t cloud the issue. In brief:

“Because only Bixby appointees are being prosecuted, the task force must be picking its targets based on political affiliations.”

Now, consider answer (A). Does a decrease in complaints tell us anything about the motives of the task force? Not really. It might be the case that the task force is doing its job fairly and impartially, resulting in a decrease in corruption. But maybe the task force is unfairly targeting Bixbyites, and complaints have dropped anyway because the real crooks in City Hall have decided to keep a low profile while the investigation is underway. Another option: the mere existence of the task force persuades the citizens that something is being done, so they feel less motivated to complain. Without more information, it’s hard to decide among these competing possibilities. Consequently, (A) goes into the pile marked “No Clear Effect.”

Answer (B) doesn’t tell us much without knowing Bixby’s reasons for keeping quiet. Perhaps Bixby knew that there was no corruption (or, at least didn’t think that there was any corruption) and kept quiet in the belief that Stephens’ task force would fail to find anything. In that case, we would have very weak circumstantial evidence that the task force is targeting Bixbyites. But what if Bixby were corrupt and only went along with Stephens’ plan in order to avoid being dragged into the investigation? As we try to reason our way through the implications of (B), we will eventually conclude that it provides no real help in evaluating the editorial’s claim. We label it “No Clear Effect.”

In contrast to the previous two options, answer choice (C) seems to strike fairly directly at the credibility of the argument. If nearly all of the potential targets for investigation (i.e., the senior city officials) are Bixbyites, then the fact that the task force is prosecuting only Bixbyites might just be a coincidence. This answer choice provides a simple alternative explanation for the pattern remarked in the editorial; in other words, it shows that the same result might occur whether or not the task force is politically motivated. Since it calls the editorial’s reasoning into question, we put (C) in the “Weaken” pile.

Answer choice (D) is another one that leaves us needing more information. Maybe the staffers who compose the task force have developed some kind of grudge against the Bixby appointees; if so, that would strengthen the argument. But they might just be honest civil servants who are interested in rooting out corruption. Unless we’re prepared to assume that the task force members are necessarily more corrupt because they work in city government, this answer belongs in the “No Clear Effect” pile. Finally, answer (E) is basically the opposite of (B), which (recall) didn’t tell us much. Bixby, we reasoned in (B), might have chosen not to oppose the task force for a variety of reasons; likewise, s/he might have decried the claims of corruption for many different reasons. This one, too, goes under “No Clear Effect.”

Now that we’ve considered each answer choice in turn, we can see that only one of them leaves the argument worse off than it was before. Answer choice (C) is clearly damaging to the editorial’s claim that the prosecutions must have been politically motivated. Each of the other answer choices could go either way.

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!

3.13: Geese and Salt Marshes, pt. 2

“According to the passage,” combined with the absence of comparative language like “most,” tells us that there can only be one right answer. We find it, we source it, we move on. As in 3.12, we need to note that the “widely held belief” (a phrase which appears in both the passage and the problem statement) is identical with the “standard view,” so information about one is effectively information about both.

Because the “belief”/”view” is introduced close to the end of this short passage, we don’t need to work through the answer choices in order: instead, it is more efficient to identify the belief and compare it with the answer choices to see if any of them match. The belief contains two basic elements: (1) “geese [and other consumers] do not play a large role […]” because (2) “bottom-up factors” are the real driving force. The first component, as it happens, matches answer choice (C) fairly directly. “Not a large role” is the same as “a minor role.”

Let’s turn for a moment to the wrong (or, in industry jargon, “distractor”) answers. Notice that all of them borrow specific phrases directly from the passage — as, indeed, does correct answer (C). This reinforces a principle referred to glancingly in previous questions: the fact that an answer quotes from the passage, or closely paraphrases it, has no real bearing on the correctness of that answer. It doesn’t make an answer more likely — or less likely — to be the correct choice. It is best, therefore, to focus on the meaning of the answers, and not on how closely or loosely they resemble the specific wording of the text.

To get more specific for a moment: answer choice (A) does indeed clash with what the author says, but not because it’s part of the “standard view” that the author is seeking to criticize. Nobody in the passage, standard or otherwise, is denying the fact that geese graze. Answer choice (B) is a little subtler: we’re told that the geese are consumers, but neither the “standard view” nor the author’s alternative has anything to say about whether they’re the primary consumers. The same goes for answer (D). The author tells us that the geese have a strong influence, but never that their role is primary; the widely-held belief is that even this is an overstatement. Finally, answer (E) blurs the distinction between consumers and “bottom-up” factors, a distinction that both the author and the “standard view” uphold.

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.