GRE GRE Certifications GRE-TEST Questions & Answers

• Question 1:

  What accounts for the low-lying. Hat surface of Mars's north? On Earth's surface, higher- and lower-lying areas have different types of onest: one. thin and dense, is pulled toward Earth's center more strongly by gravity, and the planet's water naturally comes to sit over it. creating oceans. The processes that generate this oceanic crust drive plate tectonics.

  Is Mars's north similarly characterized by a sort of crust different from other areas of the planet? Some researchers do see signs of tectonic activity surrounding the northern basin that suggest that it was created through the formation of new crust, like ocean basins on Earth. However. McGill points to northern bedrock structures that predate the features said to mark the start of the tectonic process. McGill instead believes that through some novel mechanism the ancient surface sank to its current depth as a single unit. This would explain why features around the basin's edge. which would have formed as the surface dropped, seem to be younger than structures at its floor.

  The third possibility is that the northern lowlands result from impacts. Some researchers suggest they formed as a series of big overlapping impact craters. Others, arguing that the odds against such a pattern of impacts are large, postulate a single event--the impact of an object bigger than any asteroid the solar system now contains.

  The passage implies that McGill points to certain "northern bedrock Structures? in order to

  A. establish the maximum and minimum bounds for the age of the northern basin of Mars

  B. contrast the geological characteristics of the northern basin with the characteristics of the terrain at its rim

  C. question the role of impacts in the formation of Mars's surface features

  D. dispute the idea that the northern basin of Mars was formed by the creation of new crust

  E. argue that their elevation now must be lower than it was at the time the structures formed

  Correct Answer: B

• Question 2:

  The geographer held a (i)________view of the succession of theoretical trends (environmental determinism, spatial determinism, and various types of critical theory) in her field, maintaining that theory can (n)________what is transpiring in a complex environment by focusing excessively on the favored schemes and variables of the moment.

  A. self-contradictory

  B. sanguine

  C. deprecatory

  D. exacerbate

  E. obfuscate

  F. magnify

  Correct Answer: CE

• Question 3:

  Origin, distribution, and habitat are included in the book for some but not all of the plants:

  offering this information for each species would have given readers a clearer appreciation of the differences between _________and introduced species.

  A. endemic

  B. native

  C. seasonal

  D. rare

  E. unusual

  F. dominant

  Correct Answer: AB

• Question 4:

  Scientists have long debated the exact timing of the lunar cataclysm, a period approximately 4 billion years ago when Earth and the Moon were pummeled with asteroids. A clue to this puzzle may come from spherules, millimeter-sized droplets of molten rock formed after au asteroid collides explosively with a planet. Upon impact, the asteroid vaporizes both itself and the target rock, producing a vapor plume that condenses into spherules. These form a layer preserved in rock, whose age can be estimated using radiometric dating. Scientists know of fourteen of these spherule layers scattered across Earth, but none dates to the theorized lunar cataclysm time period. Four layers, however, are from between

  3.47 and 3.24 billion years ago. indicating perhaps a slow decline in collisions. The primary purpose of the passage is to

  A. challenge a basic assumption underlying a theory

  B. analyze a flaw in a novel approach to a problem

  C. describe different processes that could have produced the same phenomenon

  D. explain how a class of data might be useful for answering a question

  E. outline a theory that may reconcile conflicting interpretations of a phenomenon

  Correct Answer: D

• Question 5:

  Normally, seeds of Emmenathe penduliflora stay dormant for years and germinate only when a fire burns through their habitat. Nitrogen dioxide in the smoke induces the seeds to germinate. Fires clear the brush, allowing germinating seeds to receive the sunlight they need to grow. The plants mature quickly, produce seeds, and then die. In areas with heavy automobile traffic, however, the seed germinates in the absence of lire, with automobile exhaust supplying the required nitrogen dioxide.

  The information given, if accurate, most strongly supports which of the following hypotheses?

  A. Fires in the habitat of £ pendulijlora do not entirely destroy the plant's seeds even in the places where the fires burn most intensely.

  B. The nitrogen dioxide in automobile exhaust eannot harm plants of E. pendulijlora after germination.

  C. If human intervention decreases the number of fires in the habitat off. pendulijlora. automobile exhaust can replicate the conditions the plant requires in order to thrive.

  D. Within the habitat of E. pendulijlora . natural fires are significantly more frequent in areas with heavy automobile traffic than they are in other areas.

  E. Unless E. pendulijlora seeds that have germinated can survive in the shade, automobile exhaust threatens the long-term survival of the plant in areas with heavy automobile traffic.

  Correct Answer: C

• Question 6:

  Some archaeologists speculate that the Americas might have been initially colonized between 40.000 and 25.000 years ago. However, to support this theory it is necessary to explain the absence of generally accepted habitation sites for that time interval in what is now the United States. Australia, which has a smaller land area than the United States, has many such sites, supporting the generally accepted claim that the continent was colonized by humans at least 40.000 years ago. Australia is less densely populated (resulting in lower chances of discovering sites) and with its overall greater aridity would have presented conditions less favorable for hunter-gatherer occupation. Proportionally, at least as much land area has been lost from the coastal regions of Australia because of postglacial sea- level rise as in the United States, so any coastal archaeological record in Australia should have been depleted about as much as a coastal record in the United States. Since there are so many resource-rich rivers leading inland from the United States coastline, it seems implausible that a growing population of humans would have confined itself to coasts for thousands of years. If inhabitants were present 25.000 years ago. the chances of their appearing in the archaeological record would seem to be greater than for Australia.

  The passage is primarily concerned with doing winch of the following?

  A. Presenting an objection to a claim

  B. Accounting for an apparent anomaly

  C. Outlining an alternative interpretation

  D. Correcting a particular misconception

  E. Questioning the validity of a comparison

  Correct Answer: A

• Question 7:

  W.E.

  B. Du Bois's exhibit of African American history and culture at the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle attracted the attention of a world of sociological scholarship whose values his work challenged. Du Bois believed that sociological sociologists failed in their attempts to gain greater understanding of human deeds because their work examined not deeds but theories and because they gathered data not to effect social progress but merely to theorize. In his exhibit. Du Bois sought to present cultural artifacts that would shift the focus of sociology from the construction of vast generalizations to die observation of particular. living individual elements of society and the working contributions of individual people to a vast functioning social structure. The passage implies that Du Bois believed which of the following statements about sociology?

  A.

  It should contribute to the betterment of society.

  B.

  It should study what people actually do.

  C.

  It should focus on how existing social structures determine individual behavior.

  Correct Answer: B

• Question 8:

  The importance of the Bill of Rights in twentieth-century United States law and politics has led some historians to search for the "original meaning" of its most controversial clauses. This approach. known as "originalism." presumes that each right codified in the Bill of Rights had au independent history that can be studied in isolation from the histories of other rights, and its proponents ask how formulations of the Bill of Rights in 1791 reflected developments in specific areas of legal thinking at that time. Legal and constitutional historians, for example, have found originalism especially useful in the study of provisions of the Bill of Rights that were innovative by eighteenth-century standards, such as the Fourth Amendment's broadly termed protection against "unreasonable searches and seizures." Recent calls in the legal and political arena for a return to a "jurisprudence of original intention." however, have made it a matter of much more than purely scholarly interest when originalists insist that a clause's true meaning was fixed at the moment of its adoption, or maintain that only those rights explicitly mentioned in the United States Constitution deserve constitutional recognition and protection. These two claims seemingly lend support to the notion that an interpreter must apply fixed definitions of a fixed number of rights to contemporary issues, for the claims imply that the central problem of rights in the Revolutionary era was to precisely identity, enumerate, and define those rights that Americans felt were crucial to protecting their liberty.

  Both claims, however, are questionable from the perspective of a strictly historical inquiry, however sensible they may seem from the vantage point of contemporary jurisprudence. Even though originalists are correct in claiming that the search for original meaning is inherently historical, historians would not normally seek.

  The passage suggests that a historian conducting a strictly historical inquiry would make which of the following assumptions when studying the Bill of Rights?

  A. The framers of the Bill of Rights sought to define each right in strict and narrow terms.

  B. The results of historical inquiry into the true meaning of its clauses must be applied to contemporary issues.

  C. Developments in thinking about individual rights ended after the codification of those rights.

  D. It is possible to determine why a particular clause was included in the Bill of Rights.

  E. Legistators of the Revolutionary era were preoccupied with defining and enumerating those rights that were crucial to individual liberty.

  Correct Answer: D

• Question 9:

  It is nn ironic reversal that just those politicians who most vociferously lambasted the distorting complexities of the country's tax system are now the ones_________an agreement that worsens the mess.

  A. espousing

  B. discounting

  C. eschewing

  D. championing

  E. negotiating

  F. ignoring

  Correct Answer: AD

• Question 10:

  Larvae of many marine invertebrate species delay their metamorphosis into juveniles when cues signaling an appropriate juvenile environment are absent thereby increasing the likelihood of thriving as juveniles and of ultimately reaching adulthood Nevertheless, delayed metamorphosis has potential costs for juveniles including reduced growth and increased mortality Nearly all evidence of such costs involves species whose larvae do not feed but rather subsist on stored nutrients, indicating that insufficient energy reserves may be an underlying cause of these costs. Supporting this hypothesis are laboratory studies showing that in a certain bryozoan. the prolonged larval swimming that results from delayed metamorphosis is associated with size reductions in the juvenile feeding organ (the lophophore) and that one factor influencing the size of juveniles of certain barnacle species is how long larvae delay metamorphosis However, other studies show that while significantly fewer juvenile Capitella worms survived to adulthood when metamorphosis had been delayed, prolonged larval swimming had no significant effect on juvenile size, suggesting, perhaps, that in some species, factors other than insufficient energy reserves account for the negative effects of the larval stresses that result from delayed metamorphosis.

  According to the passage, larvae of many marine invertebrate species delay their metamorphosis into juveniles when the larvae

  A. receive signals that the habitat in which they are swimming is favorable for larval growth

  B. receive signals that nutrients in the habitat in which they are swimming are insufficient for juveniles

  C. receive signals that the habitat in which they are swimming is more suitable for adults than for juveniles

  D. do not receive signals that juveniles of other marine invertebrate species are present m the habitat in which they are swimming

  E. do not receive signals that the habitat in which they are swimming is suitable for juveniles

  Correct Answer: E