Practice Test 3 - GRE Verbal Reasoning

20 questions. Answer them in any order, then submit to see your score and every explanation.

Passage: A growing body of commentary portrays "microdosing" psychedelic substances as a straightforward cognitive enhancer, citing anecdotal reports of improved focus and mood. The more careful clinical literature, however, offers a less tidy picture. Placebo-controlled trials are few, sample sizes are typically modest, and blinding is especially fragile when participants can often infer whether they have received an active dose. Reported benefits also tend to cluster in self-assessed outcomes rather than in objective measures of attention or creativity. None of this establishes that microdosing is ineffective; it does suggest that popular certainty has outrun the available data and that the practice's risks—drug interactions, variable purity, and the legal context—are sometimes treated as afterthoughts rather than as integral to any responsible assessment. Question: The author's attitude toward microdosing as a cognitive enhancer can best be described as…
Despite earning a substantial salary, she remained remarkably ______ with her money, mending old clothes and cooking meals at home rather than dining out, a habit her friends admired.
For each blank, choose the word or phrase that best contributes to a clear, logical sentence. Choose one answer for each blank: the choices for the first blank are labeled A–C; the choices for the second blank are labeled D–F. The critic's review was (i)_____, praising the film's cinematography at length while dismissing its script as amateurish, so that readers came away (ii)_____ about whether the movie was worth watching at all.
A civic group argues that the city's public meetings are poorly attended. The group concludes that citizens must not care about local government, and therefore the city should stop holding public meetings and instead let elected officials make decisions without public input. Which of the following identifies a flaw in the argument's reasoning?
After the scandal broke, the board did not merely reprimand the CEO; they ______ him from the company entirely.
For each blank, choose the word or phrase that best contributes to a clear, logical sentence. Choose one answer for each blank: the choices for the first blank are labeled A–C; the choices for the second blank are labeled D–F. Although the committee had publicly promised a (i)_____ review of the proposal, examining every clause and financial projection, their final report was so (ii)_____ that it barely addressed the proposal's central claims, let alone its underlying assumptions.
In "Far from being taciturn, the envoy proved garrulous at every dinner," how are "taciturn" and "garrulous" related?
An environmental economist observes that a city's air-quality monitors recorded a 12% drop in average particulate pollution during a six-month pilot in which high-emitting trucks paid a surcharge to enter the downtown zone. During the same period, retail sales tax receipts from downtown businesses were unchanged relative to the previous year, suggesting no major decline in consumer activity. Because particulate pollution is linked to respiratory illness and the pilot did not appear to harm downtown commerce, the economist argues that the city should make the truck surcharge permanent. Which of the following best states the conclusion of the argument?
Read the passage and answer the question. In debates about artificial intelligence, one common claim is that algorithmic systems are uniquely opaque: because many models involve millions of parameters, their decisions cannot be meaningfully explained. From this premise, some commentators conclude that demands for transparency are unrealistic and that society must choose between accuracy and interpretability. That conclusion, however, depends on treating "explanation" as a single standard. In many domains, the relevant question is not whether a model can be fully translated into plain language, but whether it can be audited for specific risks. A credit-scoring system, for example, might be evaluated for disparate impact across groups even if its internal representations remain complex. Likewise, a medical model might be required to show robustness to minor changes in input data, a form of accountability that does not require complete interpretive access. Still, auditability is not automatic. If training data are proprietary, if performance metrics are chosen to flatter a system, or if deployment contexts differ from testing environments, then audits can become ritual rather than remedy. Consequently, the most productive policy discussions focus less on abstract transparency and more on enforceable access: who can test a system, under what conditions, and with what legal authority. The passage is structured primarily to:
In an archival analysis, a historian compared the budgeting practices of two early 20th-century municipal governments. City R published detailed annual budgets and held public hearings before final approval; City S published only summary totals and did not record deliberations in accessible minutes. Over a 15-year span, both cities experienced similar economic shocks, but City R showed smaller year-to-year fluctuations in infrastructure spending. The historian also found that in City S, major spending increases often followed election years, whereas City R's spending increases were more evenly distributed. The historian cautions that publication practices do not automatically reveal motives but can affect how easily citizens and journalists scrutinize decisions. Which statement is most strongly supported by the information given?
The memoir's account of loss is _____ rather than maudlin: it admits grief plainly but never lingers to wring sympathy from the reader.
Select the best completion. The essay aims not to condemn the policy but to _____ it, tracing how its rules grew out of earlier compromises.
Select the answer choice that best completes the sentence. Even though the author cites dozens of studies, the argument remains ______ because none of the citations directly addresses the central claim being defended.
A research team studying urban trees reported that neighborhoods with higher tree canopy coverage had lower average summer temperatures. Yet another dataset from the same city showed that residents in the highest-canopy neighborhoods used more electricity for air conditioning during summer months than residents in lower-canopy neighborhoods. The researchers noted that high-canopy neighborhoods also tended to have larger houses and higher average household income, and that many homes in low-canopy neighborhoods lacked central air conditioning. Which of the following, if true, best resolves the apparent discrepancy?
A museum director argues that because the museum's new interactive exhibit increased average visitor time on site from 70 minutes to 95 minutes during the first month after installation, the exhibit must have improved visitor satisfaction. The director concludes that the museum should replace several traditional galleries with additional interactive exhibits to maximize satisfaction. The argument relies on which questionable reasoning pattern?
The manager's ______ praise for every minor accomplishment made the team suspicious that he wanted something from them.
For each blank, choose the word or phrase that best contributes to a clear, logical sentence. Choose one answer for each blank: the choices for the first blank are labeled A–C; the choices for the second blank are labeled D–F. The novel's plot, once praised for its (i) ______ twists, now strikes contemporary readers as merely (ii) ______, since the same devices have been recycled countless times in subsequent works.
A city's economic development office reports that after it offered a tax credit to small businesses that renovate vacant storefronts, the number of vacant storefronts downtown fell from 120 to 95 over two years. The office concludes that the tax credit caused the decline and recommends increasing the credit to reduce vacancies further. Which of the following best bolsters the author's reasoning?
Read the passage and answer the question. A climatology note described how a regional weather station network handled missing data. The network consisted of 14 stations, each recording hourly temperature and precipitation. For temperature, if fewer than 3 consecutive hours were missing, the network filled gaps by linear interpolation between the nearest available observations. If 3 or more consecutive hours were missing, the data were left as missing and excluded from daily averages. For precipitation, however, the note stated that no interpolation was performed; missing precipitation values were treated as missing regardless of gap length. The note also specified that all timestamps were stored in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), even though the stations were located in a single time zone. According to the passage, which of the following is true?
Select the answer choice that best completes the sentence. The analyst's report was praised for its clarity, but several colleagues found its tone unnecessarily _____, as if it dismissed reasonable objections before addressing them.

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