GRADUATE RECORD EXAMINATIONS®
Practice General Test #4
Answer Key for Sections 3-6
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The Graduate Record Examinations® Practice General Test #4
Answer Key.
Verbal Reasoning.
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Section 3 - Verbal Reasoning.
25 Questions.
Question 1.
Answer: innocuous
Answer in Context: Although plant and animal species that become established in ecosystems where they did not originate are sometimes referred to by the alarming term “invasive species,” many such species are innocuous in their new environments.
Question 2.
Answer: banished from
Answer in Context: Far from being banished from the corporate world because of cutbacks, serious researchers are playing a growing role in innovation at many firms.
Question 3.
Answer:
Blank 1: C. comprehensive
Blank 2: D. redundant
Answer in Context: The brief survey, published under the title The Work of Nature: How the Diversity of Life Sustains Us, is surprisingly comprehensive. Indeed it makes several longer treatments of the effects of lost biodiversity seem redundant.
Question 4.
Answer:
Blank 1: B. heed
Blank 2: F. compromise
Answer in Context: The government has no choice but to heed the incessant demands for land reform, and yet any governmental action that initiated land reform without requisite attention to agrarian reform would compromise the overall goal of economic modernization.
Question 5.
Answer:
Blank 1: C. flawlessness
Blank 2: D. wrong
Answer in Context: Certain music lovers yearn for flawlessness, but when it is achieved, there is something missing; perhaps they feel uncomfortable in a world where nothing discernible is wrong.
Question 6.
Answer:
Blank 1: B. problematic
Blank 2: E. unsound
Blank 3: H. discredited
Answer in Context: Putting a cash value on the ecological services provided by nature—such as the water filtration “service” provided by a forested watershed—has, historically, been a problematic process. Early attempts at such valuation resulted in impressive but unsound figures that were seized on by environmental advocates and then, when these figures were later discredited, they were used by opponents to tar the whole idea.
Question 7.
Answer:
Blank 1: A. imminent
Blank 2: F. curtailed
Blank 3: G. encouraging
Answer in Context: Only with the discovery of an ozone hole over Antarctica in 1985 did chemical companies finally relinquish their opposition to a ban on chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which destroy ozone. The discovery suggested that strong political action to halt production of CFCs might be imminent, and fortunately, the chemical industry no longer felt compelled to oppose such action: although companies had recently curtailed their research into CFC substitutes, studies they had initiated years earlier had produced encouraging results.
Question 8.
Answer:
Blank 1: A. row (rhymes with “cow”)
Blank 2: F. festering dispute over
Answer in Context: The incipient row regarding taxes could affect trade between the two countries much more than the festering dispute over banana imports, which has been going on for years. Unfortunately, the trade regulators seem to be ignoring both disagreements.
Question 9.
Answer: B. The shape of the teeth indicates that sauropods were herbivorous.
Question 10.
Answer: A. They are among the few fossils incorporating direct evidence of sauropod behavior.
Question 11.
Answer: C. argue against a particular position regarding sleep’s role in memory
Question 12.
Answer: A. There are some memory-consolidation processes that have nothing to do with sleep.
Question 13.
Answer: E. It concedes that the consolidation of declarative memory does not depend entirely on one factor.
Question 14.
Answer: B. identifies a specific function that sleep plays in the memory-consolidation process
Question 15.
Sentence to be completed: In American Indian art, the supposed distinction between modern and traditional was fabricated by critics, and when artists have control over interpretation of their own work, the distinction appears, happily, to have been BLANK.
Answer: A. eliminated
Answer: C. put to rest
Question 16.
Sentence to be completed: Notwithstanding their BLANK regarding other issues, township residents have consistently passed the board of education’s annual budget.
Answer: D. disagreement
Answer: E. divergence
Question 17.
Sentence to be completed: Some of the company’s supporters charged that the negative report had been motivated by a broader political assault on the company that was designed to help market rivals who would like to see the company BLANK.
Answer: A. reined in
Answer: E. manacled
Question 18.
Sentence to be completed: Skeptics contend that any scheme for charging visitors to Web sites that rewards the vendor adequately would require steep prices, BLANK the kind of frequent, casual use of Web sites that surfers now take for granted.
Answer: A. bridling
Answer: D. inhibiting
Question 19.
Sentence to be completed: It seems obvious that Miles Davis’ BLANK the Juilliard School, which resulted in his decision to drop out, was based on the school’s training of musicians for a kind of music that he did not want to play.
Answer: A. disaffection with
Answer: F. estrangement from
Question 20.
Answer: B. If a planet’s orbit is disturbed, the planet can be drawn by gravity toward the star it is orbiting.
Question 21.
Answer: A. In the last five years, there has been no decline in the number of workplace injuries leading to immediate admission to a hospital emergency room.
Question 22.
Answer: B. The possibility that the title page of a work may attribute works written by other authors to the author of that work
Answer: C. The possibility that the author’s name printed on a title page is fictitious
Question 23.
Answer: A. The title page was prepared for printing in a hurried manner.
Answer: B. Material on the title page was included without the author’s knowledge or approval.
Question 24.
Answer: B. nuances
Question 25.
Answer: C. It can allow the reader to discern in a work certain meanings that the writer did not foresee.
Section 4 - Verbal Reasoning
25 Questions
Question 1.
Answer: D. frustrating
Answer in Context: The unexplained digressions into the finer points of quantum electrodynamics are so frustrating that even readers with a physics degree would be wise to keep a textbook handy to make sense of them.
Question 2.
Answer: C. venal
Answer in Context: The belief that politicians might become venal after their election to office led to the appointment of ethics officers at various levels of government.
Question 3.
Answer: D. adequate to
Answer in Context: Even the charisma and technical prowess of two fine actors are not adequate to the task of fully invigorating a gray domestic drama with a tired tale to tell.
Question 4.
Answer: E. superfluous
Answer in Context: There may be a threshold below which blood pressure reductions become superfluous given that a long-running study showed no decreased heart risk for drops in blood pressure below a certain point.
Question 5.
Answer:
Blank 1: A. sham
Blank 2: D. cloak
Answer in Context: Unlike the problems in recent financial scandals, issues raised by the regulators in this case appear largely to pertain to unwieldy accounting rules that are open to widely divergent interpretations—not to sham transactions designed to cloak corporate malfeasance.
Question 6.
Answer:
Blank 1: B. habit
Blank 2: E. ploddingly
Answer in Context: Everyone has routines that govern their work. The myth is that artists are somehow different, that they reject habit, but of course that’s not true: most artists work as the rest of us do, ploddingly, day by day, according to their own customs.
Question 7.
Answer:
Blank 1: B. different in its effect
Blank 2: F. entails
Blank 3: G. permanent
Answer in Context: Repression of painful memories is sometimes called “willed forgetting.” Yet true forgetting is different in its effect than the phenomenon of repressed memory. In spite of the effort that it entails, repressing unwanted memories is less permanent than truly forgetting them, for repressed memories are prone to come back.
Question 8.
Answer:
Blank 1: C. collision
Blank 2: E. orthodox
Blank 3: G. clerical
Answer in Context: Rather than viewing the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s antinomian controversy as the inevitable collision of the intransigent opposing forces of radical and orthodox beliefs, male and female piety, clerical and secular power, and the like, as other critics have, Winship argues that the crisis was not “fixed and structural.”
Question 9.
Answer: C. presenting evidence to challenge an explanation and offering an alternative explanation
Question 10.
Answer: E. A half century of drought and falling groundwater levels caused a certain population to abandon their settlements along a riverbank.
Question 11.
Answer: D. local climatic variation in the environment of the southwestern United States
Question 12.
Answer: C. Moving a village because groundwater levels have changed over the last generation.
Question 13.
Answer: A. It is similar in appearance to perennial ice.
Answer: C. It tastes saltier than perennial ice.
Question 14.
Answer: E. small
Question 15.
Sentence to be completed: It would have been disingenuous of the candidate to appear BLANK when her opponent won the election, but she congratulated the victor nonetheless.
Answer: B. ecstatic
Answer: E. euphoric
Question 16.
Sentence to be completed: As market forces penetrate firms and bid up the value of attributes of labor that are more measurable than is the knowledge born of experience, it can be expected that trends in wages will not BLANK those whose main value lies in such experiential knowledge.
Answer: A. favor
Answer: B. aid
Question 17.
Sentence to be completed: The point we might still take from the First World War is the old one that wars are always, as one historian aptly put it, BLANK: they produce unforeseeable results.
Answer: B. astounding
Answer: E. stunning
Question 18.
Sentence to be completed: This is the kind of movie—stuffed with intimations of faraway strife and people in suits talking frantically on cell phones and walkie-talkies—that is conventionally described as a political thriller, but the film is as apolitical as it is BLANK.
Answer: D. humdrum
Answer: F. dull
Question 19.
Answer: A. Farmers focused primarily on growing wheat.
Answer: C. A relatively small portion of farmland was devoted to crops other than wheat.
Question 20.
Answer: D. vigorous
Question 21.
Answer: D. The appearance in 1999 of many new Internet sites that relay complaints directly to the Department of Transportation has made filing a complaint about airlines much easier for consumers than ever before.
Question 22.
Answer: C. arguing in support of one side in a controversy
Question 23.
Answer: E. It was originally constructed in an architectural style that was considered outmoded by the thirteenth or fourteenth century.
Question 24.
Answer: A. They accurately reproduce the decoration on the choir’s original lower flyers.
Question 25.
Answer: C. Because of their speeded-up growth, lobsters now get large enough to be legal catch before they reach reproductive maturity.
Section 5 - Quantitative Reasoning.
25 Questions
Question 1.
Answer: Choice C: The two quantities are equal.
Question 2.
Answer: Choice A: Quantity A is greater.
Question 3.
Answer: Choice B: Quantity B is greater.
Question 4.
Answer: Choice D: The relationship cannot be determined from the information given.
Question 5.
Answer: Choice B: Quantity B is greater.
Question 6.
Answer: Choice B: Quantity B is greater.
Question 7.
Answer: Choice A: Quantity A is greater.
Question 8.
Answer: Choice C: The two quantities are equal.
Question 9.
Answer: Choice C: The two quantities are equal.
Question 10.
Answer: Choice A: one twenty eighth
Question 11.
In question 11 you were asked to enter an integer or a decimal. The answer to question 11 is 17.5.
Question 12.
Answer: Choice C: 5
Question 13.
Answer: Choice D: negative 3
Question 14.
The answer to question 14 consists of three of the answers choices.
List B: Negative 7 negative 4 negative 2, 1, 13
List D: 2, 3, 5, 15, 19, 22
List E: 4, 5, 6, 24
Question 15.
Answer: Choice C: 6 to 5
Question 16.
Answer: Choice B: two thousand five hundred over n
Question 17.
Answer: Choice D: eighteen degrees
Question 18.
Answer: Choice B: 8
Question 19.
Answer: Choice A: 0.04
Question 20.
Answer: Choice C: 3 to 2
Question 21.
The answer to question 21 consists of two of the answer choices.
Value A: negative 9
Value F: 3
Question 22.
Answer: Choice D: (x + 1) * y x plus one, star, y
Question 23.
Answer: Choice B: It contains one point.
Question 24.
Answer: Choice E: x times y is less than x squared
Question 25.
In question 25 you were asked to enter an integer or a decimal. The answer to question 25 is 13.
Section 6 - Quantitative Reasoning
25 Questions
Question 1.
Answer: Choice A: Quantity A is greater.
Question 2.
Answer: Choice D: The relationship cannot be determined from the information given.
Question 3.
Answer: Choice B: Quantity B is greater.
Question 4.
Answer: Choice C: The two quantities are equal.
Question 5.
Answer: Choice D: The relationship cannot be determined from the information given.
Question 6.
Answer: Choice D: The relationship cannot be determined from the information given.
Question 7.
Answer: Choice C: The two quantities are equal.
Question 8.
Answer: Choice C: The two quantities are equal.
Question 9.
Answer: Choice B: Quantity B is greater.
Question 10.
Answer: Choice D: 1
Question 11.
Answer: Choice B: 4
Question 12.
In question 12 you were asked to enter either an integer or a decimal number. The answer to question 12 is 156.