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.”