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.

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.)