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!

3.5: “A newly published …”

The parallelism here is a little less obvious than in 3.4, but we can still use context clues to cut the answer choices down to size.

The passage tells us that someone just wrote a book about Shaw, so it’s clear he isn’t being disregarded (C). And the biography is a laudatory (i.e., praiseful) one, so Shaw isn’t being disparaged (B) (insulted and belittled) either. That leaves discussed (A) as our only choice for blank (i).

For blank (ii), note that the “essence of [Shaw’s] personality” means the same thing as his “true self.” So if biographers fail to present this “essence,” they are likewise failing to capture Shaw’s “true self.” Consequently, we can say that Shaw’s “true self” is disappearing (D) rather than emerging (E) or coalescing (F).

Vocab Notes

Another reason for rejecting answers (E) and (F) is that they are too similar in meaning; since they can’t both be right, they must both be wrong. To say that Shaw’s “true self” emerges in a book is virtually the same as to say that it coalesces. Note that although the figurative meanings of these words are almost identical (both mean, essentially, “to appear”) their literal meanings are quite distinct. To emerge is to come out of something: a hedgehog emerges from its burrow. When something coalesces, it takes shape from a bunch of smaller elements: water droplets coalesce into a puddle. Because coalesce and emerge share a meaning, but are not exact synonyms, they are a great example of words that might be matched up correctly in the Sentence Equivalence question type.