Sample GRE Reading Comprehension Questions

The correct answer is (A).

Because reading comprehension questions seem to require less foundational knowledge than other question types to get started—fundamentally, you really just need to know how to read (carefully)—many test takers think they don’t need to build up a strategy for these questions.

But, like other GRE questions, reading comprehension questions are constructed in specific ways, and understanding their typical structures will allow you to home in on the right information efficiently and accurately.

The text we’re dealing with here, though it looks dense at first glance, follows a very common structure: introducing a commonly held belief, and then describing ways in which that belief was challenged or modified. When reading a passage like this, you should be alert to the textual signals that indicate how it moves between that traditional belief and the challenges to it:

• “As expected, …”
• “This might seem to suggest …”
• “But researchers actually found …”
• “in direct contradiction of …”

Now, in the question here, most students home in on the “classical conception of free will” language fairly quickly. If we take a look at the passage, we can see this exact phrase in the last sentence. But at this point, students who have not taken care to understand the context of that phrase in the passage tend to go wrong.

The faulty assumption students often make is that the answer to the question will be located after these key words. This may or may not be true. Applying that logic to this passage, the information immediately following the “classical conception of free will” language states that “neural preparation to move (RP) preceded conscious awareness of the intention to move (W) by hundreds of milliseconds.”

This leads many students to select the incorrect answer choice (B), which matches this passage text almost verbatim. But of course, the key language we identified in the passage is in the middle of a sentence, not at the beginning. Always read the full sentence that contains the key words, not just the sentence fragment following it—as you will naturally think to do if you have a clear understanding of the passage’s structure.

Here, of course, the context directly reverses our initial assumption: “in direct contradiction of the classical conception of free will.” If the question is asking us to find the answer that most closely conforms to the classical conception of free will, we can’t possibly pick the answer that directly contradicts that classical conception.

So we need an answer where RP does not come before W. We can eliminate options (B), (D), and (E), which all start with RP—narrowing things down to choices (A) or (C).

At this point, you might choose between the two options by reasoning about the content of the passage—well, surely it’s more likely that will to move precedes actual movement, so we should pick (A).

That’s correct, but in fact these questions never require you to reason or guess based on information not contained in the passage. That is, you don’t even need to think about what W or P mean to get here. This part of the answer, too, is stated very explicitly in the text.

Earlier in the passage, we see “As expected, W preceded M.” “As expected” tells us that this chain of events conforms to the classical conception, rather than contradicting it. So we have our answer, (A).

Besides the importance of reading the full sentence containing the key phrase we’re looking for, working through this question also shows us that—however specialized the content of a passage may seem—it’s the structure, the shape of the story being told, that we really need to pay attention to.

The correct answer is the final sentence: “A few bowls could easily be absorbed into another category, but a roomful of earthenware could not.”

“Select-in-passage” questions like this differ from other reading comprehension questions in that you don’t get a list of answer choices. You still effectively have a multiple-choice question, but your choices are all the different sentences in the passage. Here, that gives you eight choices.

The precise language used in the answer choices in reading comprehension questions is often a key source of difficulty. Here, there’s no such list. Instead, you should expect the challenge in the question to be baked into the “Select the sentence …” prompt itself.

That’s precisely what happens here. If you read the prompt carelessly, you may think “OK, I’m looking for the answer to a question in the passage.” Naturally, you look for the question mark in the passage, and select the sentence immediately after it (“Perhaps the more earthenware …”), which of course answers that question.

But this is incorrect. You haven’t been asked to locate the sentence with the answer to a question but rather the sentence that provides support for an answer to a question.

It’s easy to skim over those extra words, assuming they’re inessential to what you’re being asked. That will never be the case. These prompts are phrased very precisely, and you need to pay attention to every word.

Well, we’ve already identified which sentence answers a question in the passage. Which sentence provides support for that answer? Logic again tells us to look at the following sentence (“A few bowls could …”), which in this case is the right choice. This sentence follows on from the “answer” sentence, providing just what the prompt asks us for: support for that answer.

In this case, the answer is the supposition that larger earthenware collections were more likely to be noted by appraisers; the support is a suggestion of why that might be: because smaller collections could easily be lumped in with another category.

The correct answer is (C).

This is an argument-based reading comprehension. Specifically, it’s a “strengthen” question; you need to find the statement that, if true, makes the argument in the passage stronger. That’s a very specific task, and it’s not the same thing as, say, assessing which statement seems most likely to be true, or deciding which statement could be another good argument in favor of the same action, or deciding which statements seem generally pro– or anti–boat paint.

When attacking a “strengthen” question like this, you should always start by deconstructing the argument and understanding exactly the line of reasoning. To summarize this argument:

• Premise 1: Recently an unusually high number of dolphins have been found dead of infectious diseases.
• Premise 2: Most of these dead dolphins had abnormally high tissue concentrations of certain compounds that, even in low concentrations, reduce dolphins’ resistance to infection.
• Premise 3: The only source of these compounds in the dolphins’ environment is boat paint.
• Premise 4: Dolphins rid their bodies of the compounds rapidly once exposure ceases.
• Conclusion: Dolphins’ mortality rate should decline rapidly if such boat paints are banned.

Now, one approach to this question is to assess the argument logically and ask whether it stands up, or whether there’s some gap in the logic that needs to be filled—i.e., an additional premise that would strengthen the argument.

In this case, the logical gap you might notice is that even if the paints were banned, it doesn’t follow that this would rapidly fix the problem. What about all the boats that have already been painted and are still in the water?

This logic leads us to option (C), which effectively fills that gap by telling us that the compounds in the paints become harmless after a few months—so only newly painted boats are harmful to dolphins, and there will be no newly painted boats if the paint is banned.

That logic might not leap out at you right away. But thankfully, this is a multiple-choice question, so you have a second path to success: eliminating all of the wrong answers.

Options (B) and (D) can quickly be dismissed because they both discuss “marine animals” in vague terms, not dolphins specifically. The argument in the passage is very specifically about dolphins and says nothing about other animals, so we know these statements are not relevant.

Option (A) talks about trends in the paints’ makeup over the last decade. This is irrelevant to an argument about the question of whether to ban the paints in response to the effects they are having “recently.”

Option (E) looks like a statement that might be made by the manufacturers as part of an argument against banning their paints. But again, it doesn’t in any way fit into the specific argument we’re dealing with, which states that if the paints are banned, dolphin mortality rates will rapidly decline.

Another detail that should draw our attention to option (C) is the repeated use of the word “rapidly” in the argument. When words are repeated in this way in a GRE text, there’s always a reason. Here, you’re supposed to notice that the argument doesn’t just state that the ban will reduce dolphin mortality rates at some point, it says that this will happen rapidly. Only one option, (C), provides evidence for the speed with which the ban will impact mortality rates.

The correct answer is (C).

This is a “logically completes the passage” question. But questions of this type, while different in presentation, still follow the logic of other types of argument-based reading comprehension questions. And figuring out which type of argument question this is will help us approach it efficiently.

In this case, the word “because” immediately before the blank tells us exactly what the answer needs to do. It needs to provide a reason for the immediately preceding statement. In other words, you’re being asked, again, which of these statements strengthens the argument?

The argument in its current form is clearly incomplete. We need something that tells us why, even though “the melting of ice floating in water does not affect the water level,” the continuation of the warming trend would still result in “serious consequences to sea levels.” Each of those two quoted phrases gives us its own clue, either of which could lead us to the correct answer.

The fact that we are concerned with “serious consequences to sea levels” in itself allows us to eliminate all of the wrong answers. Most of the options here sound like very serious consequences indeed. But four of the five are clearly not consequences to sea levels.

• Option (A) describes something that is not a change at all; it tells us about something that will “continue” to happen.
• Options (B), (D), and (E) all describe serious consequences—but not to sea levels. While we might be very concerned about disrupted ecosystems, effects on shipping routes, and changes to sea temperatures in other parts of the world, the point is that these statements represent other tangentially related arguments, not a premise of this particular argument.

From this process of elimination, we can arrive at option (C) as the right answer.

We might instead get there by paying attention to the other clue in the passage: “the melting of ice floating in water.” Option (C) talks very explicitly about “landbased glaciers”—i.e., ice that is not floating in water. The melting of this ice, we can easily infer, will have serious consequences to sea levels.

This question shows the importance of being laser-focused on the exact conditions the answer needs to fulfill, and not getting distracted with any extraneous considerations. We are not looking for just any reason, or even the most compelling reason, to be worried about this warming trend; we are looking specifically for a reason to believe it will affect sea levels.