Admission Tests GRE General Test Sample Questions:

1. 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) supported by the demonstrable technical superiority of maps made after 1S00
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) inconsistent with the way some mapmakers prior to 1800 understood their own work
E) insensitive to divisions among cartographers working in the period after 1S00

2. 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.

A) solidified
B) much less interesting
C) rapid
D) more difficult to understand
E) even more troubling
F) vanished
G) unexpected
H) surfaced
I) far-reaching

3. Instances of "galactic cannibalism"-mergers in which large galaxies completely consume smaller ones-may be fairly common. Tidal forces produced by the Milky Way's powerful gravity, for example, appear to be dismantling and engulfing a dwarf galaxy in the constellation Sagittarius, producing large clumps and streamers of stars connecting the two galaxies. Astronomers have also observed two dense clusters of stars and gas at the heart of the Andromeda galaxy, an apparent "double nucleus" that may contain the remnant of a cannibalized dwarf galaxy. But this twin-lobed appearance could also be created by two parts of a single nucleus bisected by a lane of dust. Scientists believe that only about 25 percent of such apparent double nuclei actually represent galactic cannibalism. Many of the rest result from the illusion of proximity that occurs when objects at different distances appear along the same line of sight: others consist of debris from galactic
"collisions." in which one galaxy has passed through another without merging, causing waves of new star formation.
The primary purpose of the passage is to

A) indicate the difficulty of determining whether galactic cannibalism has occurred in a given instance
B) outline the process by which galactic cannibalism takes place
C) demonstrate flaws in the evidence used to prove that galactic cannibalism actually occurs
D) present evidence that galactic cannibalism has occurred in a given instance
E) suggest that galactic cannibalism occurs more commonly than previously supposed

4. If one item is tobe randomly selected from the items whose manufacturing cost is greater than $140. what is the probability that the item selected will be one whose manufacturing time is greater than 60 minutes?
A)

B)

C)

D)

E)

A) Option
B) Option
C) Option
D) Option
E) Option

5. 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.

A) uncom
B) ordinary
C) tediou:
D) necessary
E) imiocuous
F) plicated

Solutions: