Practice Test 4 - GRE Verbal Reasoning

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

Select the answer choice that best completes the sentence. After years of conflicting results, the new meta-analysis helped _____ the debate by showing that the apparent differences were largely due to inconsistent measurement methods.
A town council argues that since the installation of LED streetlights on the town's main avenue, nighttime traffic accidents on that avenue have declined. The council concludes that replacing all streetlights in the town with LEDs will reduce nighttime traffic accidents townwide. The council's reasoning relies on the assumption that the lighting change caused the decline and that other streets will respond similarly. Which of the following, if true, most weakens the argument?
Read the passage and answer the question. A historian summarized the publication history of a scientific treatise by the chemist Elara Minton. The treatise first appeared in 1894 as a 212-page volume printed in Bristol, with a print run of 600 copies. A second edition was published in 1901, expanded to 248 pages and printed in London, and it included a new appendix describing Minton's laboratory apparatus for gas collection. The historian noted that the 1901 edition's preface explicitly thanked two colleagues, R. Sato and J. Hargreaves, for reviewing early drafts. A third edition was issued in 1913, but the historian stated that it was a "photo-reproduction" of the 1901 edition and did not add new material. The summary did not mention any translations. Which of the following is mentioned in the passage?
Read the passage and answer the question. A research team studying bilingual education examined 240 middle-school students in three districts. District A used a "90–10" immersion model: in sixth grade, 90% of instruction time was in Spanish and 10% in English. District B used a "50–50" model, splitting instruction time equally between Spanish and English. District C offered traditional English-only instruction but provided an elective Spanish class that met three times per week for 45 minutes. The team administered the same standardized reading test in English at the end of seventh grade. Mean scores were 78 in District A, 81 in District B, and 79 in District C (on a 100-point scale). The report explicitly stated that the test was not translated and that no Spanish reading assessment was administered. The team also noted that District B had the highest proportion of certified bilingual teachers (84%), while District A had 71% and District C had 12%. The authors cautioned that the districts differed in median household income, but they did not provide income figures. Which of the following is mentioned in the passage?
In "The lecture's gist, not its many digressions, was what students needed to retain," how are gist and digressions related?
Passage: Marine biologists investigating coral bleaching initially focused on peak water temperature as the primary driver: when temperatures exceed a threshold for even a short time, corals can expel their symbiotic algae. Many monitoring programs therefore tracked maximum weekly temperatures. More recent studies emphasize that the duration of heat stress matters as well. Corals exposed to moderately elevated temperatures for several weeks can bleach even if they never experience the highest peaks recorded elsewhere. This has motivated the use of "degree heating weeks," a metric that integrates intensity and time. At the same time, local conditions can modulate bleaching risk. Reefs in turbid waters sometimes experience less bleaching because suspended particles reduce light stress, though turbidity can also limit coral growth in the long run. Additionally, some reefs recover faster when herbivorous fish populations remain intact, since grazing reduces algae that would otherwise outcompete young corals. Finally, managers designing interventions face trade-offs. Efforts to reduce local stressors—such as controlling runoff to manage turbidity or protecting herbivores—can improve resilience, but they cannot fully offset the effects of large-scale ocean warming. Question: Which of the following is most strongly supported by information from the passage taken as a whole?
In "The reticent witness grew voluble under questioning," how are 'reticent' and 'voluble' related?
In "The board refused to sanction the merger until the audit was complete," the word sanction most nearly means:
A university committee notes that in departments where first-year students are assigned a faculty mentor, retention into the second year is 8 percentage points higher than in departments without such assignments. The committee also found that the mentoring program costs less per student than expanding tutoring services. Therefore, if the university's goal is to improve retention with minimal new spending, it should expand the faculty-mentoring program campus-wide. The author concludes that…
Passage: Many economists explain persistent wage gaps between regions by pointing to differences in worker skill. If one city attracts more highly educated workers, higher average wages there might simply reflect higher productivity. Policy responses, under this account, should focus on training and education rather than on place-based interventions. An alternative perspective emphasizes that wages are also shaped by local market power. When a small number of employers dominate hiring in a region, workers may have few outside options even if they are skilled. In such "monopsonistic" labor markets, wages can remain low not because productivity is low, but because bargaining leverage is asymmetric. These perspectives are not mutually exclusive, but they imply different diagnostics. If skill differences dominate, wage gaps should narrow when workers with similar credentials are compared across regions. If employer concentration dominates, wage gaps may persist even among comparable workers and may correlate with measures of firm dominance. The choice between explanations thus turns less on ideology than on what patterns the data exhibit. Question: Which of the following best describes the organization of the passage?
In a mid-sized coastal city, hospital administrators reported that, after a new hand-hygiene campaign began, the proportion of staff observed using sanitizer at key moments rose from 42% to 78% over six months. Yet during the same period, the hospital's rate of certain hospital-acquired infections (HAIs) increased by 12%. The campaign did not change staffing levels, and the hospital did not expand bed capacity. However, the laboratory also began using a more sensitive molecular test for identifying the pathogens responsible for those HAIs, replacing a culture-based test that had been standard for years. Which of the following, if true, best resolves the apparent discrepancy?
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 novelist's prose, once criticized by reviewers as (i)_____, has grown increasingly (ii)_____ over the course of her career, each successive book trimmed of the ornate flourishes that once made her sentences sag under their own weight.
Read the passage and answer the question. Recent commentary on scientific publishing has praised preprint servers for "democratizing" access to new findings by allowing researchers to share results before journal review. The appeal of speed is undeniable, and in fast-moving fields early visibility can be valuable. Nonetheless, the celebratory narrative can be somewhat inattentive to how preprints are actually consumed outside specialist circles. Journalists, policymakers, and even other scientists may treat a preprint's mere existence as a proxy for reliability, particularly when the work confirms a compelling storyline. Meanwhile, calls to "let the community review in public" often presume an abundance of time and incentives that many qualified reviewers lack, producing a system in which scrutiny is uneven and sometimes performative. Preprints can be an important complement to traditional publishing, but their virtues are not automatic; without clearer norms for interpretation and correction, the promise of openness risks being conflated with the reality of quality control. The author's stance toward preprint servers is best described as…
In "Granted, the survey was small; nonetheless, its findings point toward reform," the clause beginning with "Granted" serves as:
A journal editor examined citation patterns after introducing a double-blind peer-review policy (reviewers and authors anonymous to each other). In the three years before the change, papers from the journal's host institution accounted for 18% of accepted articles; in the three years after, they accounted for 11%. Over the same periods, the proportion of submissions from the host institution remained approximately constant. The editor also noted that acceptance rates for papers from institutions with which editorial-board members had past collaborations declined slightly after the policy change. Which statement is most strongly supported by the information given?
A regional government subsidized the installation of rooftop solar panels, expecting household electricity purchases from the grid to decline. Utility data did show that, on sunny days, households with panels bought less electricity during midday hours. However, annual grid purchases for those same households did not decline appreciably compared with similar households without panels. The utility also introduced a time-of-use pricing plan that made electricity more expensive in the early evening, and many solar households purchased electric heat pumps during the year. Which explanation best accounts for the situation described?
Read the passage and answer the question. In discussions of employee performance, managers often treat "motivation" as a stable trait that some workers possess and others lack. This view encourages interventions aimed at selecting inherently driven individuals rather than improving working conditions. Yet research on goal pursuit suggests that motivation is highly sensitive to context: people exert more effort when tasks are clearly defined, when feedback is timely, and when they can see how their work contributes to a larger outcome. Importantly, these contextual supports do not merely increase effort; they can also change what employees interpret as success. For example, when feedback emphasizes learning and iteration, workers may persist through early failure because progress is framed as skill development rather than as evidence of inadequacy. However, the passage does not claim that context eliminates individual differences. Some workers may still respond more strongly than others to the same conditions, and long-term interests can shape which tasks feel meaningful. The central point is that organizations err when they treat motivation as a fixed internal resource. A more effective approach is to view motivation as an interaction between individuals and environments, making it possible to design workplaces that reliably elicit sustained engagement. The primary purpose of the passage is to:
Read the passage and answer the question. An economics article summarizes a randomized controlled trial of a text-message reminder program for property-tax payments in a mid-sized municipality. The trial enrolled 12,000 households that had been at least 30 days delinquent in the previous tax year. Households were randomly assigned to one of three groups: 4,000 received no messages, 4,000 received a single reminder 14 days before the due date, and 4,000 received two reminders—one 14 days before and one 3 days before the due date. The passage explicitly states that the due date for the tax installment studied was October 31, 2022. Payment outcomes were assessed using administrative records on November 30, 2022. The article reports that the two-reminder group had a 6.2 percentage-point higher on-time payment rate than the control group, and it notes that messages were sent in both English and Spanish. The municipality's average delinquent balance at baseline was $740 per household, and the passage specifies that households with balances above $5,000 were excluded from the study. The passage states that…
In "Investors stayed sanguine despite dire forecasts, having hedged every position," how does "sanguine" relate to "dire"?
A city's transportation department notes that after installing protected bike lanes on three major corridors, bicycle commuting increased by 22% and reported cyclist injuries on those corridors fell by 14% over the next year. During the same period, overall car travel times on adjacent parallel streets did not measurably increase, according to GPS-based traffic data. Because the department aims to reduce injuries without worsening congestion, it argues that the city should expand protected bike lanes to additional corridors with similar traffic patterns. Which of the following best states the conclusion of the argument?

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