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.