Official GRE Text Completion Practice Questions

The correct answer is (C).

When you tackle GRE text completion questions, always bear in mind that you’re not looking for just any answer that seems like it could plausibly fit in the sentence, but specifically the answer that is explicitly supported by the surrounding context.

This sample question provides a good demonstration. We’re looking for an adjective that describes “the mode by which she [Burke] gathered her oral evidence.” (The unusual word order can trip some students up; it can help to reorganize this part of the sentence: “the mode by which she gathered her oral evidence is especially __________.”)

Now, although we might rule out option (B), “passable,” as a word that seems very unlikely to be intensified by “especially,” all of our other options are superficially plausible. It’s easy to imagine contexts in which a mode of gathering evidence is described as especially crucial, dubious, laudable, or ingenious. None of these phrases seems like bad or unnatural-sounding English. But only one of them is correct.

This is because, of course, we need to pick an option that doesn’t just read well but has some kind of definitive support from the surrounding context.

That context is the claim that Burke is “on slippery ground”—she’s doing something questionable, risky, open to criticism. And our answer is modified by the adverb “especially,” so we can see that it functions as a restatement of the same quality described by “slippery ground.”

Options (A), (D), and (E) are in fact all saying something highly positive, not suggesting any kind of criticism. (If “laudable” is an unfamiliar word for you, you can still likely figure out its meaning—worthy of praise—based on related words like “applaud.”) And even (B), without giving strong praise, is suggesting that Burke’s methods are, well, good enough.

We are left with the correct answer, (C). “Dubious” means doubtful or questionable, just the quality we’re looking to describe. If this was another unfamiliar word, again, looking at its similarity to the word “doubt” can give you a clue as to its meaning. Or you might simply settle on it by process of elimination, seeing that all the other options are irrelevant to the context.

Looking at our options in the context of the sentence’s actual meaning shows that only one option makes sense here. None of the others are even close to matching the necessary meaning, and in fact are mostly tending in the exact opposite direction, making them demonstrably wrong.

The correct answers are (B) and (F).

When the challenge of a text completion question lies in figuring out the meaning being expressed in the sentence (rather than, say, the difficulty of the words you need to choose from), it’s often on a micro rather than a macro level. That is, you’ll have a sense of the overall structure but get tripped up by specifics.

Here, it’s easy enough to see that the argument is about a booming trade in scientific literature, some anxiety it caused for publishers, and the knock-on effect that situation had on authors.

Where people most often go wrong here is on the first blank, and in a specific way.

• Most people will quickly rule out option (C), “embargoes.” There just isn’t anything in the sentence to suggest why these new titles would be subject to embargoes, nor is it clear why that would help authors.
• The incorrect answer that people often pick here is (A), “prices.” This results from a lack of attention to the specific context—to whose perspective we are looking at here. If you, as a reader, were to worry about some quality of books, it would probably be prices. But we’re not talking about readers’ worries, we’re talking about publishers’ worries. Publishers will be happy, not worried, about a market that enables them to charge high prices.
• The correct choice, (B), is the only one supported by the context. We’re told that the trade in scientific literature was “robust”—i.e., there was high demand for these books. What do you need to meet demand? Supply. Publishers needed constant supplies of new titles to meet the high demand.

This leads us naturally to the second blank. Authors, “even relatively undistinguished authors,” are affected in some way by publishers’ anxiety about maintaining a steady supply of new titles. What effect makes sense in the context?

• Option (D) is easy to dismiss now. Why would a high demand for authors’ work limit their relevance? It would have exactly the opposite effect.
• Option (E) is slightly more tempting since it describes a positive effect for authors, but there’s no logic to connect the state of the market with their scholarly credentials (and we’ve just been told they’re “relatively undistinguished,” which this answer would seem to contradict).
• Option (F) should jump out at us as the correct answer. It describes an effect that would logically be produced by publishers’ anxiety to acquire a large number of new titles. If publishers desperately need new titles, the authors supplying those titles clearly have strong bargaining positions.

Getting this question right is mostly a matter of following the logic through clearly in your head. Only one choice for each blank is supported by the context, and the answer to the second blank becomes especially clear once you have figured out the first one.

Success on multiple-blank text completion questions hinges on a skill set that’s pretty universal but often overlooked. This is the ability to work through the question strategically, not simply in a linear fashion but starting from the blank that we can answer most definitively and working our way out to those blanks that may seem open-ended until we’ve worked out the answers to the others.

This question is a great example of why that’s so crucial. If you try to start with the first blank, you’ll probably get stuck or guess randomly, because all three options seem totally plausible—until you know what the rest of the paragraph goes on to say. That is, we need to make a comparison between true forgetting and repressed memory, but the content of that comparison isn’t indicated by anything up to this point in the text. The necessary context comes later.

Our best bet in the case of this question is to start at the end. The third blank comes a little before the end of the text, which tricks some students into ignoring what comes after it. That’s never a good idea, and in this case especially because that last clause in fact gives us the answer to this blank.

The conjunction “for” simply means “because.” So we’re being given a reason that what the sentence says up to that point is true. That reason is “repressed memories are prone to come back.” So repressing unwanted memories is less … what? … than truly forgetting them? It becomes immediately clear that (G), “permanent,” is the answer to this blank.

Working backward, the second blank is now easier to fill in. We see that “in spite of” is setting up an unexpected contrast. Even though repressing memories is … something …, it’s less permanent than truly forgetting them.

Well, we would expect something with less permanent results to require less effort, not more—but “in spite of” tells us that the relationship will be the opposite of what we expect. So (D), “eases,” is out. Option (E), “conveys,” is out simply because it’s not clear what it would mean in this context to “convey an effort.” Option (F), “entails,” means “involves” and is our only logical answer.

Now that we know what’s going on in the rest of the sentence, we can much more easily infer what’s happening in the first blank. We’ve established the key difference that repressing memories is less permanent than truly forgetting them. That doesn’t say anything about how “controlled” the two phenomena are, as (A) would suggest. Nor does it make any claim about which is more common, as in (C).

(We might have our own intuitions about which of these phenomena is more common or more controlled, but we shouldn’t guess on the basis of our own thoughts on the topic.)

So our answer, by process of elimination, is (B), “different in its effect.” Now, that’s pretty vague; we don’t actually learn what this difference is until we read the next sentence. For that reason, it’s unlikely you’d guess correctly if you tried to fill in this blank first. You’re primed to look for a more appealingly specific claim. But with the added context, you can see clearly that the other options, although more specific, are fully unsupported by what the text goes on to say.