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.