Information and Ideas
The following is from a naturalist's monograph on Chandelure, a Ghost/Fire-type Pokémon.
Folklore holds that the flames flickering atop a Chandelure serve to guide wandering spirits toward the afterlife. Yet the naturalist Verel proposes a less benevolent function. Observing that Chandelure congregate most densely in ruins where travelers are known to have vanished, and that their flames burn hottest in the presence of the living rather than the dead, Verel suspects the creatures' light is not a guide at all.
Which finding would most directly support Verel's hypothesis about the flames' function?
A) Chandelure are more commonly sighted in ruins than in inhabited towns.
B) Living creatures drawn toward a Chandelure's flame were later found to have disappeared without a trace.
C) The flames of a Chandelure emit a wavelength of light visible to most Pokémon.
D) Spirits are, according to tradition, incapable of perceiving ordinary firelight.
B) Living creatures drawn toward a Chandelure's flame were later found to have disappeared without a trace.
Though generations of trainers dismissed Stunfisk as wholly ________, recent study reveals a hunting strategy of surprising cunning beneath its inert, mud-caked exterior.
A) formidable
B) inept
C) deceptive
D) volatile
Inept
The naturalist opens her account of Zangoose not with its famed ferocity but with a quieter fact: the creature grooms its fur with meticulous, almost tender care each dawn. Only after establishing this habit does she turn to the savagery for which it is known—savagery, she implies, no more the whole of Zangoose than the morning ritual is.
What is the main rhetorical function of the passage's structure?
A) It catalogs the stages of Zangoose's daily routine in chronological order.
B) It withholds the creature's better-known trait in order to complicate a one-sided reputation.
C) It contrasts Zangoose with a rival species to explain their feud.
D) It argues that Zangoose's gentleness is a deception masking its true nature.
B) It withholds the creature's better-known trait in order to complicate a one-sided reputation.
The Galarian Weezing purifies the air it inhales, expelling gases cleaner than those it takes in. In heavily polluted cities, ________, its presence is prized rather than feared.
A) accordingly,
B) nonetheless,
C) by contrast,
D) for instance,
A) accordingly,
Trekking the frozen reaches of Mount Coronet, the researcher at last glimpsed her ________ a lone Absol silhouetted against the snow, motionless as the peak behind it.
A) quarry
B) quarry:
C) quarry, which was
D) quarry, and
B) quarry:
The Pokémon Xatu is said to stand motionless for entire days, one eye fixed upon the past and the other upon the future. Trainers who have kept Xatu report that it makes no effort to avert the calamities it appears to foresee, remaining as still before disaster as before an ordinary dawn. Some interpret this passivity as indifference; others suggest that Xatu, perceiving all of time at once, no longer distinguishes what is to come from what has already occurred—and thus regards intervention as _______
A) an obligation it is too fearful to fulfill.
B) a task better suited to its trainer than to itself.
C) as futile as attempting to alter the settled past.
D) a rare privilege granted only to the most gifted seers.
C) as futile as attempting to alter the settled past.
The chronicler's praise of Lugia was so ________ that later readers struggled to separate the Pokémon's documented deeds from the embellishments of an admirer determined to exalt it beyond all measure.
A) fulsome
B) grudging
C) measured
D) perfunctory
Fulsome
That Slaking is among the most powerful Pokémon in raw strength is beyond dispute. Yet nature, as if wary of such power, has bound it: for every burst of exertion, the creature must pass a full turn in idleness, its might useless in the interval. One is tempted to read in Slaking a kind of parable—that no force is granted without its answering constraint.
The final sentence primarily serves to _______
A) offer practical advice to trainers who wish to battle Slaking.
B) cast doubt on the claim that Slaking is powerful.
C) draw a broader reflection from the specific limitation just described.
D) introduce a rival Pokémon that lacks Slaking's weakness.
C) draw a broader reflection from the specific limitation just described.
Most researchers assumed Feebas's dull appearance reflected an equally unremarkable physiology. Recent analysis, ________, revealed the fish to possess a resilience surpassing that of far handsomer species.
A) similarly,
B) therefore,
C) however,
D) in addition,
C) however,
Neither the ancient carvings nor the balladeer's fervent song ________ sufficient, in the skeptic's view, to establish that the Legendary bird had ever truly walked among the living.
A) were
B) was
C) are
D) have been
B) was
The following is adapted from a nineteenth-century field account.
I had long believed the Kecleon a creature of pure mischief, its color-shifting hide employed only to pilfer and evade. But a season's patient watching disabused me of the notion. The Kecleon alters its hue not merely to vanish from the eyes of predators but to signal its fellows—a deepening crimson before a storm, a wan grey in mourning of a lost mate. What I had dismissed as trickery was, I came to see, a grammar; and I, who fancied myself the observer, had been the illiterate all along.
Which choice best states the main idea of the text?
A) The Kecleon uses its color-changing ability primarily to steal from other creatures.
B) The narrator successfully taught himself to communicate with the Kecleon.
C) The narrator revised his understanding, recognizing the Kecleon's color changes as a form of communication he had failed to read.
D) The Kecleon's coloration serves no purpose beyond concealment from predators.
C) The narrator revised his understanding, recognizing the Kecleon's color changes as a form of communication he had failed to read.
Far from ________ the tension between the feuding Pokémon, the trainer's clumsy intervention only inflamed it, and what had been a wary standoff erupted into open combat.
A) allaying
B) aggravating
C) provoking
D) ignoring
A) allaying
The following is adapted from an early modern bestiary.
Of the Duskull it is written that it delights to trail the wayward child through the wood at dusk, not to devour, as some suppose, but to deliver a fright the more lasting for being harmless. Wherefore mothers of that country invoke its name to quicken the laggard step of the young—so that the very terror of the thing is bent, by custom, to the keeping of children safe.
The passage is primarily structured to _______
A) recount the historical origins of a particular superstition.
B) present a creature's frightening reputation and then show how that reputation is turned to a protective purpose.
C) refute the popular belief that Duskull poses a danger to children.
D) compare the Duskull's behavior with that of similar nocturnal creatures.
B) present a creature's frightening reputation and then show how that reputation is turned to a protective purpose.
The bond between a trainer and a Riolu is not commanded but earned; the creature reads intention through waves of aura no gesture can counterfeit. A trainer may feign patience or affection, ________, and find the Riolu wholly unmoved, its trust reserved for feeling it knows to be genuine.
A) then,
B) instead,
C) likewise,
D) as a result,
A) then,
The Galarian Corsola, bleached white by the warming of the seas it once ________ has become, to many naturalists, an unwilling emblem of a vanishing world.
A) adorned;
B) adorned
C) adorned,
D) adorned:
C) adorned,
The following is adapted from a poem addressed to the Legendary Pokémon Cresselia, said to bring restorative dreams.
Not yours the blaze that scars the waking eye,
Nor yours the thunder's boast, the tempest's claim;
You come unheralded, and passing by,
Leave no wreckage, and demand no name.
Yet who, at morning, counts the gentle debt—
The terror unremembered, the calm kept—
And thinks to thank the power that let him forget
The lesser hours he might have wept?
The poem primarily characterizes Cresselia's influence as _______
A) profoundly beneficial yet routinely overlooked by those who receive it.
B) destructive in ways that its recipients fail to notice.
C) demanding of recognition that is rarely granted.
D) modest in effect but widely and gratefully acknowledged.
A) profoundly beneficial yet routinely overlooked by those who receive it.
The professor's theory concerning Unown was elegant but ultimately ________: it accounted beautifully for the symbols' shapes while explaining nothing of the purpose that shapes were presumably meant to serve.
A) irrefutable
B) comprehensive
C) hollow
D) pragmatic
Hollow
Text 1: The devastation attributed to Groudon's ancient awakenings, writes the geologist Marisse, need not be read as malice. A creature that expands the landmass and parches the sky acts not against the world but according to a nature indifferent to the beings caught in its wake. To call such a force cruel is to mistake scale for intent.
Text 2: The historian Toll grants that Groudon possesses no cruelty as humans understand it. Yet he resists Marisse's easy absolution. A flood that drowns a village, he observes, is not exonerated by its want of a motive; and those who suffered under Groudon's droughts were no less bereaved for the creature's innocence. Indifference, in his account, offers cold comfort to the afflicted.
Based on the texts, how would Toll most likely respond to Marisse's final claim?
A) By agreeing that Groudon's scale exonerates it of any wrongdoing.
B) By insisting that Groudon acts with deliberate malice toward humans.
C) By granting the absence of intent while denying that it lessens the suffering caused.
D) By arguing that Groudon's droughts caused no genuine harm to human settlements.
C) By granting the absence of intent while denying that it lessens the suffering caused.
A student researching the Pokémon Yamask compiled these notes:
The student wants to convey the emotional significance the mask holds for Yamask. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information to accomplish this goal?
A) Yamask is a Ghost-type Pokémon that carries a mask wherever it travels.
B) The mask a Yamask carries resembles the face it wore as a human being.
C) Bearing the face of its human life, the mask so anguishes and consoles Yamask that separation from it leaves the creature mournful.
D) Trainers have observed that a Yamask becomes agitated when it is separated from its mask.
C) Bearing the face of its human life, the mask so anguishes and consoles Yamask that separation from it leaves the creature mournful.
By the time the expedition deciphered the final glyph, the Unown that had swarmed the ruined chamber ________ long since dispersed, leaving the walls as silent as the researchers who studied them.
A) has
B) had
C) have
D) having
B) had
The following is from a scientific report on the Pokémon Girafarig, whose tail terminates in a second head possessing its own small brain.
Researchers initially assumed the tail-head to be vestigial—a decorative relic without function. Subsequent trials complicated this view. When the primary head was lulled to sleep, the tail-head remained alert, snapping at approaching threats the forward brain could not perceive. Yet the two brains were observed to act at cross-purposes only rarely; far more often, the tail-head's vigilance appeared calibrated precisely to those moments when the primary brain's attention lapsed. The report stops short of claiming coordinated intent, noting only that if the tail-head were truly independent, one would expect its activity to bear _______
A) a close resemblance to the behavior of the primary head.
B) no consistent relationship to the primary head's periods of inattention.
C) evidence of a shared purpose uniting the two brains.
D) signs of the decorative function researchers first proposed.
B) no consistent relationship to the primary head's periods of inattention.
The following is adapted from an eighteenth-century treatise.
The vulgar sort esteem the Alakazam for the prodigies of its intellect; but the discerning naturalist, unmoved by such ________ display, attends rather to the frailty of its frame, wherein the true wonder—that so feeble a vessel should contain so vast a mind—more properly resides.
As used in the text, "________" (the word completing the sentence) most nearly means
A) fraudulent
B) ostentatious
C) fleeting
D) commonplace
B) ostentatious
Text 1: The following is from a Romantic-era ode to Ho-Oh, said to grant eternal life to those who witness its flight.
Blest, thrice blest, the eye that once hath known
That plumage streaming down the riven cloud!
For him the grave unclenches; he alone
Walks deathless, who beneath those wings hath bowed.
Text 2: The following is from a later, skeptical commentary.
The poets, in their fervor, forget to ask what manner of gift is deathlessness among the dying. To watch each companion committed to the earth, to outlast affection, purpose, even the memory of one's own name—this the balladeers reckon a blessing. I reckon it the subtlest of the god-bird's cruelties, and doubt the sufferer would thank his benefactor.
Based on the texts, the author of Text 2 would most likely characterize the "blessing" celebrated in Text 1 as _______
A) a supposed gift whose true cost the earlier poet failed to consider.
B) a fiction invented to comfort those who fear death.
C) a reward deservedly reserved for the most virtuous witnesses.
D) a power that Ho-Oh has never actually been shown to possess.
A) a supposed gift whose true cost the earlier poet failed to consider.
A student writing an essay on the Pokémon Cofagrigus compiled these notes:
The student wants to emphasize that Cofagrigus's fearsome reputation served a practical social function, regardless of the legends' literal truth. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information to accomplish this goal?
A) Cofagrigus resembles a golden coffin and is said to have once been a greedy human.
B) Though no verified account exists of anyone being swallowed, the legends persist to this day.
C) Whether or not it ever truly devoured a thief, Cofagrigus's dreaded image was placed in tombs precisely to frighten grave robbers away.
D) Legends claim that Cofagrigus swallows those who attempt to steal the gold it guards.
C) Whether or not it ever truly devoured a thief, Cofagrigus's dreaded image was placed in tombs precisely to frighten grave robbers away.
The treatise advances a single, audacious ________ that the Porygon, though wrought entirely of code, may possess an inner life no less genuine for having never drawn ________ a claim its author defends across three dense and closely argued chapters.
A) claim, that ... breath;
B) claim: that ... breath—
C) claim; that ... breath,
D) claim that ... breath:
B) claim: that ... breath—