Practice Test Vocab Words
Define "generalist"
A person competent in many fields
As a monthly newsletter formed in 1969 by a group of Asian American students at the University of California, Los Angeles, Gidra helped raise awareness about social and political issues concerning the Asian American community on campus and at large. The newsletter had an expansive reach for a publication of its kind: around 4,000 copies were published each month.
A student writing a history paper, however, hypothesizes that Gidra’s influence cannot be measured by the number of newsletters published monthly alone.
Which finding, if true, would most directly support the student’s hypothesis?
A. The students who initially formed Gidra each contributed financially to its creation.
B. In addition to covering current events, Gidra also featured works of art and literature.
C. Gidra was initially based out of the Asian American Studies Center at UCLA.
D. People would often give their copies of Gidra to others once they had finished reading an issue.
Answer: D. People would often give their copies of Gidra to others once they had finished reading an issue.
Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories about detective Sherlock Holmes were published between 1887 and 1927. They have inspired countless successful adaptations, including comic strips, movies, and a television series Sherlock Hound, directed by Hayao Miyazaki, who is celebrated for his animated movies. Until 2014, these stories were copyrighted. The right to adapt was only available to those who could afford the copyright fee and gain approval from the strict copyright holders of Doyle’s estate. Some journalists predict that the number of Sherlock Holmes adaptations is likely to increase since the end of copyright means that ______
Which choice most logically completes the text?
A. Doyle’s original stories will become hard to find.
B. people will become more interested in detective stories than they were in the 1800s.
C. producing adaptations will become easier and less expensive.
D. the former copyright holders of Doyle’s estate will return fees they collected.
Answer: C. producing adaptations will become easier and less expensive.
"Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?"
Vocab-in-Context
Dance choreographer Jawole Willa Jo Zollar aims to give people the opportunity to be ______ her creative process. For example, live performances of her dance HairStories, which debuted in 2001, featured videos of people across the United States talking about their hair and audience members sharing pictures of their interesting hairstyles.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
A. nervous about
B. completed by
C. delayed by
D. involved in
Answer: D. involved in
Define "spurious"
Not genuine or false
A researcher conducted an experiment inspired by studies suggesting that people may benefit from feeling frightened in certain circumstances, such as when watching scary movies or visiting haunted attractions. The researcher recruited several participants and had them walk through a local haunted house attraction. Immediately after exiting the attraction, each participant completed a survey about their experience. Based on the survey responses, the researcher claims that feeling frightened in controlled situations can boost a person’s mood and confidence.
Which quotation from a participant would best illustrate the researcher’s claim?
A. “After I came out of the haunted house, I felt very accomplished and less stressed.”
B. “My friends kept laughing as we were walking through the haunted house.”
C. “The haunted house was scary at first, but I knew everyone was just acting, so I felt less scared after a few minutes.”
D. “The sense of relief I felt at the end of the haunted house was similar to the feelings I have when I finish a scary movie.”
Answer: A. “After I came out of the haunted house, I felt very accomplished and less stressed.”
North American gray wolves usually have mixed gray and white fur, but some members of the species have a version of a gene, or gene variant, that gives them a mostly black coat instead. Sarah Cubaynes and her team studied twelve populations of North American gray wolves. They found that the black-furred wolves are more common in areas where outbreaks of distemper virus happen regularly. The team also discovered that the black-furred wolves are more likely to be immune to distemper than the gray-furred wolves are. Taken together, these findings suggest that ______
Which choice most logically completes the text?
A. North American gray wolves experience more outbreaks of distemper virus than other wolf species do.
B. the gene variant that results in black fur may be linked to immunity to the distemper virus.
C. the average life span of gray wolves is likely to increase over time because of a particular gene variant.
D. gray-furred wolves will soon replace black-furred wolves across North America.
Answer: B. the gene variant that results in black fur may be linked to immunity to the distemper virus.
"Which choice most logically completes the text?"
Inference
The following text is from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby.
[Jay Gatsby] was balancing himself on the dashboard of his car with that resourcefulness of movement that is so peculiarly American—that comes, I suppose, with the absence of lifting work in youth and, even more, with the formless grace of our nervous, sporadic games. This quality was continually breaking through his punctilious manner in the shape of restlessness.
As used in the text, what does the word “quality” most nearly mean?
A. Standard
B. Prestige
C. Characteristic
D. Accomplishment
Answer: C. Characteristic
1. Recognized as being accurate and authoritative
2. Included in a list of sacred books accepted as genuine
A student is examining a long, challenging poem that was initially published in a quarterly journal without explanatory notes, then later republished in a stand-alone volume containing only that poem and accompanying explanatory notes written by the poet. The student asserts that the explanatory notes were included in the republication primarily as a marketing device to help sell the stand-alone volume.
Which statement, if true, would most directly support the student’s claim?
A. The text of the poem as published in the quarterly journal is not identical to the text of the poem published in the stand-alone volume.
B. Many critics believe that the poet’s explanatory notes remove certain ambiguities of the poem and make it less interesting as a result.
C. The publishers of the stand-alone volume requested the explanatory notes from the poet in order to make the book attractive to readers who already had a copy of the poem in a journal issue.
D. Correspondence between the poet and the publisher reveals that the poet’s explanatory notes went through several drafts.
Answer: C. The publishers of the stand-alone volume requested the explanatory notes from the poet in order to make the book attractive to readers who already had a copy of the poem in a journal issue.
In her 2021 article “Throwaway History: Towards a Historiography of Ephemera,” scholar Anne Garner discusses John Johnson (1882–1956), a devoted collector of items intended to be discarded, including bus tickets and campaign pamphlets. Johnson recognized that scholarly institutions considered his expansive collection of ephemera to be worthless—indeed, it wasn’t until 1968, after Johnson’s death, that Oxford University’s Bodleian Library acquired the collection, having grasped the items’ potential value to historians and other researchers. Hence, the example of Johnson serves to ______
Which choice most logically completes the text?
A. demonstrate the difficulties faced by contemporary historians in conducting research at the Bodleian Library without access to ephemera.
B. represent the challenge of incorporating examples of ephemera into the collections of libraries and other scholarly institutions.
C. lend support to arguments by historians and other researchers who continue to assert that ephemera holds no value for scholars.
D.illustrate both the relatively low scholarly regard in which ephemera was once held and the later recognition of ephemera’s possible utility.
Answer: D.illustrate both the relatively low scholarly regard in which ephemera was once held and the later recognition of ephemera’s possible utility.
Based on the texts, how would Chris Brierley (Text 2) most likely respond to the discussion in Text 1?
Cross-Text Connections
Disproving the common misconception of Native art as ______, the painters whose work appears in the collection at the National Museum of the American Indian employ a range of styles. There are artists working in the traditional arts of their specific tribal communities, artists working in European modernist or American abstract expressionist art traditions, and artists blending various traditions into something wholly new.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
A. uncontroversial
B. individualistic
C. theoretical
D. homogeneous
Answer: D. homogeneous
Use "augmented" in a sentence
Answers may vary
Rivers rich in sediment appear yellow, while increases in red algae make rivers appear red. To track things like the sediment or algae content of large US rivers, John R. Gardner and colleagues used satellite data to determine the dominant visible wavelengths of light measured for various segments of these rivers. The researchers classified wavelengths of 495 nanometers (nm) and below as red, wavelengths between 495 and 560 nm as blue, and wavelengths of 560 nm and above as yellow. The researchers concluded that for the Missouri River, segments flowing into lakes tend to carry more sediment than those flowing out of lakes.
Which finding, if true, would most directly support the researchers’ conclusion?
A. The segments of the Missouri River that had higher levels of chlorophyll-a, which contributes to the green color of photosynthetic organisms, have dominant wavelengths of light between 490 and 560 nm.
B. In lakes through which segments of the Missouri River pass, the dominant wavelength of light tended to be above 560 nm near the lakes’ shores and below 560 nm in the lakes’ centers.
C. The majority of the segments of the Missouri River were found to have dominant wavelengths of light significantly higher than 560 nm.
D. Segments of the Missouri River flowing into lakes typically had dominant wavelengths of light above 560 nm, while segments flowing out of lakes typically had dominant wavelengths below 560 nm.
Answer: D. Segments of the Missouri River flowing into lakes typically had dominant wavelengths of light above 560 nm, while segments flowing out of lakes typically had dominant wavelengths below 560 nm.
Although military veterans make up a small proportion of the total population of the United States, they occupy a significantly higher proportion of the jobs in the civilian government. One possible explanation for this disproportionate representation is that military service familiarizes people with certain organizational structures that are also reflected in the civilian government bureaucracy, and this familiarity thus ______
Which choice most logically completes the text?
A. makes civilian government jobs especially appealing to military veterans.
B. alters the typical relationship between military service and subsequent career preferences.
C. encourages nonveterans applying for civilian government jobs to consider military service instead.
D. increases the number of civilian government jobs that require some amount of military experience to perform.
Answer: A. makes civilian government jobs especially appealing to military veterans.
"Which choice best describes the function of the underlined portion in the text as a whole?"
Text Structure and Function
Seminole/Muscogee director Sterlin Harjo ______ television’s tendency to situate Native characters in the distant past: this rejection is evident in his series Reservation Dogs, which revolves around teenagers who dress in contemporary styles and whose dialogue is laced with current slang.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
A. repudiates
B. proclaims
C. foretells
D. recants
Answer: A. repudiates
Use "engender" in a sentence AND define it
Definition: To cause or give rise to
Although many transposons, DNA sequences that move within an organism’s genome through shuffling or duplication, have become corrupted and inactive over time, those from the long interspersed nuclear elements (LINE) family appear to remain active in the genomes of some species. In humans, they are functionally important within the hippocampus, a brain structure that supports complex cognitive processes. When the results of molecular analysis of two species of octopus—an animal known for its intelligence—were announced in 2022, the confirmation of a LINE transposon in Octopus vulgaris and Octopus bimaculoides genomes prompted researchers to hypothesize that that transposon family is tied to a species’ capacity for advanced cognition.
Which finding, if true, would most directly support the researchers’ hypothesis?
A. The LINE transposon in O. vulgaris and O. bimaculoides genomes is active in an octopus brain structure that functions similarly to the human hippocampus.
B. The human genome contains multiple transposons from the LINE family that are all primarily active in the hippocampus.
C. A consistent number of copies of LINE transposons is present across the genomes of most octopus species, with few known corruptions.
D. O. vulgaris and O. bimaculoides have smaller brains than humans do relative to body size, but their genomes contain sequences from a wider variety of transposon families.
Answer: A. The LINE transposon in O. vulgaris and O. bimaculoides genomes is active in an octopus brain structure that functions similarly to the human hippocampus.
One theory behind human bipedalism speculates that it originated in a mostly ground-based ancestor that practiced four-legged “knuckle-walking,” like chimpanzees and gorillas do today, and eventually evolved into moving upright on two legs. But recently, researchers observed orangutans, another relative of humans, standing on two legs on tree branches and using their arms for balance while they reached for fruits. These observations may suggest that ______
Which choice most logically completes the text?
A. bipedalism evolved because it was advantageous to a tree-dwelling ancestor of humans.
B. bipedalism must have evolved simultaneously with knuckle-walking and tree-climbing.
C. moving between the ground and the trees would have been difficult without bipedalism.
D. a knuckle-walking human ancestor could have easily moved bipedally in trees.
Answer: A. bipedalism evolved because it was advantageous to a tree-dwelling ancestor of humans.
What does the text most strongly suggest about Sleep No More’s use of its performance space?
Central Ideas and Details
New and interesting research conducted by Suleiman A. Al-Sweedan and Moath Alhaj is inspired by their observation that though there have been many studies of the effect of high altitude on blood chemistry, there is a ______ studies of the effect on blood chemistry of living in locations below sea level, such as the California towns of Salton City and Seeley.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
A. quarrel about
B. paucity of
C. profusion of
D. verisimilitude in
Answer: B. paucity of