GRE Practice Exam Questions and Answers

A divide between aesthetic and technical considerations has played a crucial role in mapmakiug 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.

It can be inferred from the passage that, beginning in the 1980s. historians of cartography

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, during the period of the American Revolution and the early republic, political poems appeared regularly in newspapers and pamphlets. commenting on the issues and controversies engaging the new nation. Given the sheer number of poems that engaged explicitly with politics, one might wonder why the form has remained largely ignored by scholars of early American literature even as many other once obscure forms—sentimental novels, diaries, travelogues, belles letters—have enjoyed unprecedented scholarly interest in recent decades. Part of the reason may stem from frustrations involved with reading poems that are so highly topical—often requiring, even as a condition of first-level comprehension, a familiarity with names and references that, while wholly recognizable in their own time, are obscure to modem readers. Yet beyond this is the fact that American political verse from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has never fully shaken off the verdict, delivered by its earliest generation of scholarly readers. that it is simply unworthy of serious attention as literature. Even the term commonly used to describe it—"verse." as opposed to "poetry"— suggests an occasional or forgettable, rather than enduring, form of expression, not quite deserving the designation of poetry. Nor was such verse considered by early critics as worthy of the designation "American." as the tendency of eighteenth-century American poets to model their works on those of British precursors suggested an unforgivable failure, as one critic described it. to declare their "literary independence" from Britain.

The passage suggests which of the following about the "earliest generation**?

The snow-covered surface of the lake presents a reassuring illusion of________. but beneath the snow the ice is riven with treacherous cracks.

The public has not reacted favorably to the majority of the policies adopted by the present government. If. however, the electoral landslide by which the government achieved power five years ago was. as is often claimed, a mandate for more conservative policies, then the public response to most of the government's policies would have been favorable.

If the statements in the passage are true, which of the following must also be true on the basis of them?

Ultimately the ethical implications of neuroscieuce may be (i)_________than those of genetics. The transformations of behavior possible by manipulating neurons are both more predictable and more thorough than what can be achieved by altering genes. Even if the ethical and practical constraints on genetic experimentation suddenly (ii)_________- we'd have to wait decades to see the outcome of such experiments. Altering the brain's functioning, by contrast, can produce startlingly (iii)_________results.

When Ms. Alvarez campaigns, she lends to_________small towns: most of her campaign appearances occur in large population centers and media markets.

Sunflower sea stars help maintain certain kelp forest ecosystems by eating quickly reproducing prey species such as urchins, thus keeping populations low. Without the sea stars, the urchin population explodes, which is bad news for kelp forests and everything in them. Gianl kelp can grow to 150 feet underwater at a speed of two feet a day. but their weaknesses are their holdfasts. which are akin to tree roots. The holdfasts are home to brittle stars, prawns, and snails, among other creatures. Urchins like to eat the kelp holdfasts. Once the holdfasts are gone, the rest of the kelp drifts oft* in the tides. In this way. urchins can destroy the forests, which, higher up. are also home (o fish, including several types of commercially important rockfish,

The passage compares kelp holdfasts to tree roots in order to

Since scientific truths must be discovered, and since many, probably most, are far from (i)_________. Futile investigations are (ii)_________. Thus, the path to the truth is decidedly a (iii)_________one.

The relevance of the literary personality—a writer's distinctive attitudes, concerns, and artistic choices—to the analysis of a literary work is being scrutinized by various schools of contemporary criticism. Deconstmctionists 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.

It can be inferred from the passage that on the issue of how to analyze a literary work, the new historic its would most likely agree with the deconstructionists that

The physical act of drinking may seem_________to humans since we can ftilly close our mouths to create suction, but species that cannot do so. including most adult carnivores, must resort to some other mechanism.