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!

3.7: “There is nothing that …”

At first glance, three-column Text Completion (TC) questions seem to be much more difficult than their one- and two-column counterparts. While it’s true that they usually take longer to solve, these questions can be broken down step-by-step and attacked with the same techniques as the shorter TCs. What’s more, because these questions derive their difficulty mainly from their structure and their length, they will often (though not always) cut you a break on vocabulary. If you’re comfortable with the TC format but find yourself stumbling over unfamiliar words, you may even find the three-column questions easier to solve than some of the one-column questions, which can degenerate into “vocab salad.”

In this particular passage, we have two blanks — (i) and (iii) — that depend on one another for meaning; either both answers make sense, or neither does. Blank (ii) can be treated separately. To tackle the paired blanks, we cross-compare, considering each possible combination of answers for (i) and (iii). We might set up a chart like the one below to facilitate this process:

Now we need to think about how someone amazed (A) by a scientific breakthrough might react to the news. Would they show contempt (G) — meaning disrespect or dismissiveness? Probably not. How about indifference (H) or insincerity (I)? These don’t make much sense either; none of them describes the behavior of a person who is amazed. We can infer from this that amazes (A) can’t be the right answer, since none of the reactions in (iii) follow from it.

We then repeat the process with pleases (B), and we find pretty quickly that neither contempt (G), nor indifference (H), nor again insincerity (I) is the likely reaction of someone who is pleased with an outcome. So we can cross (B) off our list and conclude that the scientists must be nettled (C), meaning acutely annoyed or irritated, when outsiders step in and solve the problem they were working on. That leaves us with the question of which reaction — contempt (G), indifference (H), or insincerity (I) — best reflects a feeling of annoyance. It seems clear that contempt (G) is the winner here.

Finally, we turn back to the standalone blank (ii). It’s asking us, in effect, “What is the role of the first sentence of the passage?” Is it an exposition (D)? No, that would imply a detailed explanation, when what we’re actually given is a general statement about human nature. It’s not an objurgation (E), which is a harsh rebuke or criticism. This author may be gently critiquing the scientists for their unreceptiveness to ideas from outside their field, but s/he isn’t rebuking or scolding them as objurgate would imply. Thus, we have methodically confirmed what we probably already suspected — the first sentence is best described as an observation (F).