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 4 a shot before reading this!

4.2: “James Boswell’s Life …”

The central question here is: what “claim” is being made about Boswell that might be applied to Johnson instead? Well, the passage tells us that Boswell is regarded as the “first great modern biographer.” So our blank will capture the idea of “being the first to do something.” Which of these five words gets at this notion of “firstness?”

• Partisanship (A) means “bias,” especially bias in favor of a specific party or faction. You don’t have to be very original to be a partisan.
• Omniscience (B) means “all-knowingness,” which is way out of scope. Neither Boswell nor Johnson is credited with being supernaturally intelligent — at least, not in this passage.
• Precedence (C) literally means “coming before” (think “precede”). Most often, we use this word to describe something that is more important or urgent than another thing: “homework takes precedence over Facebook.” But it can also mean “coming first in time,” which is how the word is used here. This answer is our winner.
• Opportunism (D) isn’t quite as nice as it may sound. It means “taking advantage of opportunities as they show up” — regardless of how it affects other people. Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello is often described as an opportunist.
• Perseverance (E) means “steady effort in the face of difficulties or setbacks” — in other words, hard work. But working hard at something isn’t enough to guarantee that you’ll be the first one to achieve it. (Just ask Leibniz.)

Like most of the one-column TC questions, this is pretty straightforward … as long as you know the words! If any of the answer choices were unfamiliar, remember to make some flash cards so you can lock those new words into your working vocabulary.