GRE GRE Certifications GRE-TEST Questions & Answers

• Question 71:

  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.

  The author of the passage talks about Wonder Woman primarily to

  A. provide an example of a change in the public perception of comics" characters

  B. identify the gender stereotypes in comics against which feminists struggled

  C. suggest the extent to which the comics industry remained a male-dominated field

  D. note a significant improvement in the way women were represented in comics

  E. contest the claim that superheroes were generally portrayed as outcasts

  Correct Answer: A

• Question 72:

  It is hardly (i)_________that Roland, raised to (ii)_________ostentation, is building a house that is the antithesis of opulence.

  A. undeniable

  B. remarkable

  C. irrevocable

  D. savor

  E. recognize

  F. flout

  Correct Answer: BE

• Question 73:

  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.

  Which of the following historical documents, if they existed, would most strengthen the author's characterization of Revolutionary constitutionalism?

  A. Placards from 1791 urging people to ratify the Bill of Rights because it explicitly mentions all rights deserving of constitutional protection

  B. Personal letters of a framer of the Bill of Rights complaining about his colleagues' failure to reach consensus about which rights to protect and how to protect them

  C. Minutes of a meeting during which the precise wording of a right was worked out in order to ensure that the right had a single meaning

  D. The diary of a framer of the BUI of Rights that details a discussion concerning why one particular clause should be included in the Bill of Rights

  E. Newspaper editorials asserting that the framers of the Bill of Rights failed to develop creative or innovative ideas about rights

  Correct Answer: B

• Question 74:

  Typefaces, in one sense, are just like styles of shoes: they________ because different people have different tastes and identities and because both creators and users value novelty for its own sake.

  A. bemuse

  B. converge

  C. proliferate

  D. abound

  E. evolve

  F. coincide

  Correct Answer: CD

• Question 75:

  Though humanitarian emergencies are frequent features of television news, such exposure seldom_________the public, which rather seems resigned to a sense of impotency.

  A. paralyzes

  B. demoralizes

  C. assuages

  D. galvanizes

  E. exasperates

  Correct Answer: C

• Question 76:

  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." But 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 author mentions "visual artists, nrchitecis. and musicians" primarily lo

  A. note a challenge that Monroe faced when attempting to implement her ideas

  B. highlight what Monroe regarded as a contrast between the economic needs of poets and those of other artists

  C. explain Monroe's ideas about measures that would advance poetry

  D. acknowledge that anticapitalism had not hail undesirable consequences for all art forms

  E. illustrate the point that some art forms are inherently more economically viable than others

  Correct Answer: B

• Question 77:

  A divide between aesthetic and technical considerations has played a crucial role in mapmaking and cartographic scholarship. Some nineteenth-century cartographers, for instance, understood themselves as technicians who did not care about visual effects, while others saw themselves as landscape painters. That dichotomy structured the discipline of the history of cartography. Until the 1980s, in what Blakemore and Harley called "the 'Old is Beautiful' paradigm.* scholars largely focused on maps made before 1800. marveling at their beauty and sometimes regretting the decline of the pre-technical age. Early mapmaking was considered art while modem cartography was located within the realm of engineering utility. Alpers. however, has argued that this boundary would have puzzled mapmakers in the seventeenth century, because they considered themselves to be visual engineers.

  According to the passage. Alpers would say that the assumptions underlying the "paradigm" were

  A. inconsistent with the way some mapmakers prior to 1800 understood their own work

  B. dependent on a seventeenth-century conception of mapmaking as visual engineering

  C. unconcerned with the difference between the aesthetic and the technical qualities of mapmaking

  D. insensitive to divisions among cartographers working in the period after 1S00

  E. supported by the demonstrable technical superiority of maps made after 1S00

  Correct Answer: A

• Question 78:

  Through a steady stream of books, articles, and speeches, he sought to provide (i)_________analysis of political and economic issues, thus (ii)_________, rather than merely touting, the social utility of the scientific method.

  A. a dispassionate

  B. a jaundiced

  C. an intuitive

  D. demonstrating

  E. undermining

  F. praising

  Correct Answer: CD

• Question 79:

  Many people eschewed botany as merely the_________business of renaming and reclassifying plants until the concern over Earth's loss of biodiversity brought botany into everyday discussions.

  A. arcane

  B. stodgy

  C. enlightening

  D. esoteric

  E. essential

  F. indispensable

  Correct Answer: AD

• Question 80:

  Since Gilmore. as a critic, has rarely if ever disliked works that are surprising and unpredictable, he will undoubtedly view this new novel as a (i)_________. since it skillfully (ii)_________conventional expectations.

  A. conundrum

  B. failure

  C. triumph

  D. satisfies

  E. assumes

  F. confounds

  Correct Answer: CF