GRE GRE Certifications GRE-TEST Questions & Answers

• Question 51:

  A law has been proposed requiring the cargo boxes of trucks carrying gravel to be covered by a tarpaulin, because vehicles driving close behind open-topped gravel trucks can be damaged by gravel (lying off these trucks. The law is unlikely to substantially reduce such damage, however: flying gravel is much less likely to come from the cargo box itself than from the grooves of the tires, in which gravel can become wedged during loading.

  Which of the following, if true, provides the strongest support for the argument given?

  A. The drivers of vehicles behind a gravel truck are more likely to remain close behind the truck if the truck's cargo box is covered than if it is uncovered.

  B. Most trucks that carry gravel already carry tarpaulins that their drivers use to cover the cargo box when they are carrying sand, which can blow out of the cargo box in significant quantities.

  C. Of all the damage that occurs to vehicles on the highway, debris that flies oft* tracks is the cause of only a very small fraction.

  D. The proposed law allows open-topped trucks on the highway to haw uncovered cargo boxes whenever their cargo boxes are empty.

  E. Because of the great weight of a load of gravel, the driver of a gravel truck is often driving much more slowly than most of the other vehicles on the road.

  Correct Answer: A

• Question 52:

  In the age of new media technologies, the (i)_________an event and its recording appears to have been

  (ii)_________: rather than referring to a concert in which both performers and audience members are (iii)M "live" is increasingly used to identify the way in which a performance was recorded or transmitted.

  A. revenue from

  B. distinction between

  C. quality of

  D. maximized

  E. erased

  F. misunderstood

  G. emotionally engaged

  H. physically present

  I. culturally sophisticated

  Correct Answer: BFH

• Question 53:

  Business leaders who prefer centralized, pyramidal managerial structures to diversity and competition tend to (i)_________dissent in the decision-making process. But this insistence on (ii)_________can be dangerous in that it deprives decision makers of a full range of alternatives.

  A. foster

  B. spontaneity

  C. deprecate

  D. unanimity'

  E. overrate

  F. ambiguity

  Correct Answer: BE

• Question 54:

  The poet Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906) was the premier Black writer of poetry that used the dialect of rural African Americans of the southern United States. Although Dunbar's works were both popular with readers and acclaimed by literary critics during his lifetime, after the First World War a radical shift occurred, at least in critical opinion of his poetry, and twentieth-century critical evaluation of his work has been generally negative. Some critics attacked his work on social grounds for failing to challenge plantation stereotypes of African Americans. Other critics, such as the poet James Weldon Johnson, argued from aesthetic grounds that dialect poetry in general was too limited as an artistic medium, and capable of producing only two effects: pathos and humor. The negative critical trend only began to reverse itself in the 1970s, when scholars began to emphasize the importance of mythic, psychological, and historical dimensions of Dunbar's works, focusing on the interior and exterior realities of African American life after the Civil War.

  Which of the following can be inferred from the passage concerning scholars' use of mythic, psychological, and historical considerations in evaluating Dunbar's works?

  A. Such use disputes the claim that Dunbar's work failed to challenge plantation stereotypes of African Americans.

  B. Such use challenges the claim that dialect poetry is well suited to producing effects of pathos and humor.

  C. Such use supports the claim that Dunbar's poetry was aesthetically more limited when written in dialect.

  D. Such use suggests that the initial reception accorded Dunbar's poetry may have been too positive.

  E. Such use suggests that earlier twentieth-century evaluations of Dunbar's poetry may have been too negative.

  Correct Answer: E

• Question 55:

  Harriet Monroe, who founded Poetry: A Magazine of Verse in 1912. argued that the more heterogeneous and sprawling the modem world became, the more poetry needed "an entrenched place, a voice of power." Hut this goal could only be realized if poets were valued in ways that encouraged them to participate in the world and made writing verse economically viable. Monroe argued that poets needed sites of institutional opportunity like those that had been developed for visual artists, architects, and musicians. She believed that the hand-wringing anticapitalism dominating genteel literary culture--particularly the idea that poetry ought to be removed from "sordid" pecuniary considerations--brought no economic and only illusory aesthetic benefits, instead severing poets from meaningful participation in the modern world.

  The passage suggests that Monroe believed that finding "an entrenched place, a voice of power" for poetry would rely on which of the following?

  A. Providing poets with a refuge from the sprawling modem world

  B. Ensuring that poetry as an art could remain free of economic considerations

  C. Creating institutional opportunities for poets to make their work economically viable

  Correct Answer: C

• Question 56:

  Although a Inch concentration of cholesterol in the blood increases the body's ability to fight off infections it typically also increases the risk of dying from a stroke or heart attack, two of the most common causes of death However, in a recently completed ten-year study of people eighty-five and older, higher cholesterol levels tended to be associated with greater longevity.

  Which of the following, if true, most helps to explain the contrast between the highlighted effect of high cholesterol levels and the result of the study?

  A. Both heart attacks and strokes are typically brought on by an obstruction of the flow of blood through a blood vessel.

  B. Blood cholesterol levels can be controlled in part by suitable dietary regimens

  C. Among the participants m the study, the proportion with very high blood cholesterol levels was higher than among the general population.

  D. Regular monitoring of the participants in the study revealed that most of them maintained relatively stable blood cholesterol levels over tune.

  E. As people age. the body's ability to fight off infections diminishes.

  Correct Answer: D

• Question 57:

  Our eating habits are rooted in our physiology, but they are also_________the culture in which we grow up.

  A. symbolic of

  B. mediated by

  C. influenced by

  D. ascribed to

  E. inferable from

  F. universal in

  Correct Answer: CD

• Question 58:

  When applied to written records, the word "preservation" is fraught with multiple meanings and connotations For some archivists, preservation involves the attempt to save artifacts from physical deterioration and is synonymous with the conservation of original documents. For archivists with a contrary view the overriding obligation is to save intellectual content through the use of surrogates. Thus the original earners of information are seen as superfluous and consequently disposable The practice of microfilming old newspapers and discarding the originals is one example of such preservation. On yet another level, preservation considers whether limited storage space should be allotted indefinitely to materials that are rarely consulted or whether certain items are so peripheral to current interests that they should be discarded altogether to ensure a home for more-pert inent materials.

  It can be inferred that which of the following approaches to preservation would be unacceptable to "some archivists: but acceptable to the archivists with a contrary views as the two groups positions are described in the passage?

  A. Displaying a historical document in a glass case m order to allow the public to view the document without damaging it

  B. Scanning a governor's handwritten commentary on political correspondence into a computer file and disposing of the originals in order to save physical space

  C. Destroying videotapes containing eyewitness accounts of news events if the files have not been viewed by anyone in the previous five years

  Correct Answer: AC

• Question 59:

  The_________of biographies of antebellum capitalists is particularly striking in contrast with the abundance of life stones of industrialists in later eras.

  A. brevity

  B. banality

  C. utility

  D. paucity

  E. triteness

  F. dearth

  Correct Answer: DF

• Question 60:

  Experimental magazine essays are quite in vogue, but many of the characteristic that now seem innovative will doubtless look (1)________in thirty years" time; a vaunted self- consciousness will look affected, a fractured style, far from appearing (ii)________ will appear (lii)________instead.

  A. mannered

  B. groundbreaking

  C. foreign

  D. radical

  E. conventional

  F. pretentious

  G. quaint

  H. idiosyncratic

  I. auspicious

  Correct Answer: CDE