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!

3.1: “Many find it strange …”

Our clue in this Text Completion problem is tortuous, which literally means “full of twists and turns.” When used to describe a piece of writing, it means “lengthy and complicated.” Before we look at the answers, we want to fill in the blank with our own best guess. In this case, that would be something that means the opposite of tortuous: straightforward or simple. Of the choices given here, only clear (E) shares that meaning.

Even if you’re not sure exactly what tortuous means, you may be aware that it has a negative connotation; that is, it’s not a good thing for writing to be tortuous. On this logic, people rightly exclude tedious (B; “dull and repetitive”) and possibly painstaking (A; see below). But what about insightful (C) and sophisticated (D), both of which have a positive connotation? We can weed these out by using a compatibility test:

Can a piece of writing be insightful and tortuous at the same time? Absolutely.
How about sophisticated and tortuous? Again, yes.

Since we already know that the correct answer means “not tortuous,” (C) and (D) must be incorrect.

Vocab Notes

Be careful to distinguish between tortuous and torturous. The latter means “characterized by cruel pain or suffering.” (Mnemonic: the extra r in torturous stands for “rack.”)

Note also that painstaking (A) means “involving care and diligence,” not “painful” as is sometimes thought. (This is one case where etymology can help you to lock in the correct meaning of the word.) When asked to hyphenate this word, students often write “pain-staking,” conjuring up images of Dracula or maybe of a painful gambling loss. In fact, the word painstaking comes from pains-taking, and to take pains to do something is to do it with great care. The original phrase rarely appears in contemporary writing, but the compound word painstaking survives.