GRE GRE Certifications GRE-TEST Questions & Answers

• Question 191:

  The relevance of the literary personality--a writer's distinctive attitudes, concerns, and artistic choices--to the analysis of a literarys work is being scrutinized by various schools of contemporary criticism. Deconstructionisls view the literary personality, like the writer's biographical personality, as irrelevant. The proper focus of literary analysis, they argue, is a work's intertextuality (interrelationship with other texts), subtexts (unspoken, concealed. or repressed discourses), and metatexts (self-referential aspects), not a perception of a writer's verbal and aesthetic "fingerprints." New historicists also devalue the literary personality, since, in their emphasis on a work's historical context, they credit a writer with only those insights and ideas that were generally available when the writer lived. However, to readers interested in literary detective work--say scholars of classical (Greek and Roman) literature who wish to reconstruct damaged texts or deduce a work's authorship-- the literary personality sometimes provides vital clues.

  The passage is primarily concerned with

  A. discussing attitudes toward a particular focus for literary analysis

  B. describing the limitations of two contemporary approaches to literary analysis

  C. pointing out the similarities among seemingly contrasting approaches to literary analysis

  D. defending the resurgence of a particular focus for literary analysis

  E. defining a set of related terms employed in literary criticism

  Correct Answer: A

• Question 192:

  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 crust: 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.

  As presented in the passage. McGill's account of the formation of Mars's northern basin differs from the others mentioned in that it alone

  A. explains the formation of certain northern bedrock features

  B. does no! specify the force that caused the northern basin to be lower than its surroundings

  C. takes the northern basin to be a landform that is not analogous to any found on Earth

  D. denies that features around the northern basin are the result of tectonic activity

  E. attributes the creation of the northern lowlands to processes occurring within the planet

  Correct Answer: B

• Question 193:

  Age data from meteorites suggests that, in contrast to the relatively_________pace of planetary evolution we are

  witnessing today, the first ten million years or so of our solar system history were extremely eventful.

  A. structured

  B. uncertain

  C. pedestrian

  D. productive

  E. menacing

  Correct Answer: C

• Question 194:

  In contrast to today, when many readers consider the moral sentiments expressed in the ancient writer's work to be quite sophomoric. in the writer'! own tune these sentiments were regarded as remarkably________.

  A. arcane

  B. brash

  C. melancholy

  D. sagacious

  E. sanguine

  Correct Answer: C

• Question 195:

  Like paleontologists who interpret timescales from fossil evidence, we infer the history of star formation in the Milks' Way galaxy from the heavy-element composition of its stars. According to the big bang theory of the origin of the universe, the first gas clouds--and the first generation of stars formed from them--were composed of pure hydrogen and helium; most heavier elements-- iron and calcium, for example--came later, created by explosions of supernovas, massive stars in their death thaws. Loaded with heavy elements, material ejected from supernovas enriched the interstellar gas clouds from which the next generation of stars formed, the level of heavy elements increasing with succeeding generations. Because most stars live for many billions of years and because the Milky Way is thus composed of multiple stellar generations, comparing the number of stars of low heavy-element abundance with those of high heavy-element abundance enables astronomers to untangle the history of star formation in the Milky Way.

  Replacement of the word "enriched" with which of the following words results in the least change in meaning for the passage?

  A. refined

  B. altered

  C. heightened

  D. briehtened

  E. improved

  Correct Answer: B

• Question 196:

  Researchers concluded thai although the success of pearl millet crops in the region varied with seasonal

  climatic conditions, cultivation remains_________because of pearl millet's predisposition to perform under

  stressful growing conditions, including drought.

  A. erratic

  B. advantageous

  C. inconsistent

  D. prevalent

  E. impractical

  F. expedient

  Correct Answer: BF

• Question 197:

  The appropriateness of_________with those to whom one owes loyalty is evident in the Confucian view

  that rulers who are not living up to their roles should be urged to rectify their behavior.

  A. commiserating

  B. collaborating

  C. negotiating

  D. expostulating

  E. sympathizing

  F. remonstrating

  Correct Answer: C

• Question 198:

  One difficulty in convincing early scientists that craters fanned as a result of impacts from space is that most craters are circular. Impacts could come in at any angle, and experiments firing projectiles in the laboratory show that low-angle impacts lead to elliptical craters, not circular ones. Furthermore, while there was rarely evidence of any impacting object, there was often silicate melt around, suggesting that craters were caused by volcanic processes. The breakthrough in understanding crater origin was the recognition that the shock caused by the impacting object--not the object itself--creates a circular crater some twenty Times larger than the diameter of the impactor. The impact also generates enough heat to largely vaporize the impactor and melt the native rock.

  Based on the passage, it can be inferred that research focused on "a classical case of bilingualism"

  A. could not establish metrics to compare bilinguals' and monolinguals' cognitive performance

  B. overstated the cognitive benefits of achieving perfect command of two languages as an adult

  C. identified a weak but consistent correlation between bilingualism and enhanced cognitive functioning

  D. failed to distinguish the effects of language acquisition from the effects of language use

  E. mischaractenzed the significance of childhood bilingualism for later language learning

  Correct Answer: E

• Question 199:

  Writing for the New York Times in 1971. Saul Braun claimed that - todays superhero is about as much like his predecessors as today's child is like his parents." In an unprecedented article on the state of American comics, "Shazam! Here Comes Captain Relevant. Braun wove a story of an industry whose former glory producing jingoistic fantasies of superhuman power in the 1930s and 1940s had given way to a canny interest in revealing the power structures against which ordinary people and heroes alike struggled following World War II Quoting a description of a course on 稢omparative Comics" at Brown University, he wrote, 'New heroes are different--they ponder moral questions, have emotional differences, and are just as neurotic as real people. Captain America openly sympathizes with campus radicals.. Lois Lane apes John Howard Griffin and turns herself black to study racism, and everybody battles to save the environment."" Five years earlier. Esquire had presaged Braun s claims about comic books: generational appeal, dedicating a spread to the popularity of superhero comics among university students in their special 'College Issue." As one student explained. "My favorite is the Hulk. I identify with him, he's the outcast against the institution.'1 Only months after the NW York Times article saw print. Rolling Stone published a six-page expose on the inner workings of Marvel Comics, while Ms. Magazine emblazoned Wonder Woman on the cover of its premier issue--declaring s Wonder Woman for President'"" no less--and devoted an article to the origins of the latter- day feminist superhero.

  Where little more than a decade before comics had signaled the moral and aesthetic degradation of American culture, by 1971 they had come of age as America's "native art::: taught on Ivy League campuses, studied by European scholars and filmmakers, and translated and sold around the world, they were now taken up as a new generation's critique of American society. The concatenation of these sentiments among such diverse publications revealed that the growing popularity and public interest in comics (and comic- book superheroes) spanned a wide demographic spectrum, appealing to middle-class urbamtes, college-age men. members of the counterculture, and feminists alike. At the heart of this newfound admiration for comics lay a glaring yet largely unremarked contradiction: the cultural regeneration of the comic-book medium was made possible by the revamping of a key American fantasy figure, the superhero, even as that figure was being lauded for its realism"" and social relevance."" As the title of Braun's article suggests, in the early 1970s, "relevance" became a popular buzzword denoting a shift in comic-book content from oblique narrative metaphors for social problems toward direct representations of racism and sexism, urban blight, and political corruption.

  It can be inferred that the author of the passage regards the concatenation" of sentiments surrounding comics as evidence of

  A. a concerted effort by the comics industry to revamp the comic book superhero

  B. a consensus among critics that comics should be regarded as native art

  C. the influence of international readers on the domestic popularity of comics

  D. the capacity of comics to appeal to readers with a variety of social and political affiliations

  E. the impact of the counterculture on the regeneration of the comic book medium

  Correct Answer: B

• Question 200:

  The iacl thai ihcre are so many varieties of youthful dissent indicates that there is considerably less_________to this counterculture than has been suggested.

  A. hypocrisy

  B. relevance

  C. spontaneity

  D. deeeneraev E. coherence

  Correct Answer: E