Gmat - Reading Comprehension Practice Questions (100)

Debate over whether Arthur is a fictional hero or historicist persists among scholars. Cite parallels with earlier figures to illustrate how the arguments against a historical author emerge.

Assess how researchers question the reliability of sources on the King Arthur legend, tracing Cumbria, a 10th-century text, to an 8th-century chronicle and disputed evidence.

Analyze competing historical claims about Arthur as a myth versus a historical figure, comparing scholars like John Morris and Noel Myers, and evaluate evidence presented in the passage.

Explore whether Arthur was historicized by inclusion in real-event accounts, contrasting mythic origins with historicist readings, and note parallels to totemic figures later treated as history in early Britain.

Analyze how the author weighs positive and negative evidence about a historical figure's existence and takes a position, noting that linking mythical and historical figures is not the main purpose.

Practice analyzing an except question on Arthurian history, identifying which claim about Arthur’s existence is not supported by sources, archaeology, and post-Roman writings.

Explain how the author argues a figure is fictional by noting absence from key sources, such as Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the ecclesiastical history of the English people, implying nonexistence.

Disrupting circulation signals, accumulated toxins in birds' fat cause an immediate inability to realize fullness and hinder migratory refueling.

Practice reading comprehension with a passage on modern Greek as a vernacular evolution of ancient Greek, where demotic Greek and Cattaraugus complement each other to form modern Greek.

Clarifies that modern Greek cannot be simply demotic or katharevousa, but is a fusion of both forms.

The reading asserts that social context determines whether a speaker uses high or low language to convey meaning, with the speaker selecting the appropriate form.

Analyze how global warming reshapes the hydrological cycle, highlighting changing precipitation patterns, water availability in river basins, and the implications for dams and water scarcity.

The lecture explains that the hydrological cycle has become increasingly unpredictable, making last century data unreliable for planning the size of dam projects.

Explore Charles McKay's view on tulip mania, noting that speculation could negatively affect other parts of the economy and that Dutch commerce suffered a severe shock.

Merchants and skilled craftsmen dominated the tulip trade in 17th-century Holland, not the nobility, implying their share of the economy was smaller than the nobility's, with limited economic fallout.

Explore how the last paragraph explains why price swings in tulip bulb contracts do not prove a bubble. It links 16, 36, 37 Dutch prices to economic and political context.

Identify the author's definition of an economic bubble: asset prices that deviate from intrinsic value, as explored in GMAT reading comprehension question 18.

Analyze the second paragraph’s data on volcanic activity, crater distribution, and a planet-wide uniform surface age, highlighting potential systematic flaws in the Magellan data and supporting a sudden catastrophic change.

Assess the evidence for and against Venus surface models by weighing signs of inactive versus occasional active volcanism, and how a planet-wide outburst would alter the surface.

Geology's legitimacy as a science rests on gradualist models explaining Earth and other planets; the passage critiques catastrophic biblical views and emphasizes Earth-based gradual explanations.

Analyze the author's purpose in a Venus surface study with the Magellan probe, evaluate competing models and objections, and identify the most persuasive answer in reading comprehension.

Assess how Venus geology is debated between catastrophic and gradualist models by examining volcano sizes, erosion without oceans, satellite effects, and core temperature to identify gradualist support.

Compare environmental regulation costs in the United States and Japan, revealing higher regulatory transaction costs and abatement expenses in the US while pollution levels remain similar.

Narrow the focus of U.S. environmental regulations to manufacturing processes and pollution categories, overlooking broader decisions about processes and raw materials.

Analyze a weakening question about the effect of social media tools in the workplace, noting traditional channels versus social media, redundancy, and both negative and positive effects on company culture.

Analyze why social media tools become less effective as a company grows, as comfort levels and workplace culture fail to align with social media, making employees reluctant to use them.

Identify the primary purpose of a passage about social media tools for corporate communication, detailing two studies' findings by Major Centocelle and Gorshin.

Examine how Earth's polarity changes are inferred from limestone formations and fossil records, and how scientists use rock layers and fossil distributions to test a hypothesis.

Learn how scientists use iridium to determine the duration of clay deposition and the age of the layer, guiding interpretation of event chronology in reading comprehension question 33.

Analyze how iridium concentrations in the clay layer support a six-mile asteroid impact as the cause of mass extinction, distinguishing the correct explanation from other options.

Analyze how uniformitarianism explains gaps in the fossil record as incompleteness rather than extinction. Evaluate answer choices to identify the option that best reflects the fossil record interpretation.

Explore how the 9th Amendment protects unlisted rights without implying denial of others, and examine Madison's framing of the Bill of Rights amid the 18th-century debate.

This passage analyzes the Ninth Amendment, contrasts liberal and traditionalist interpretations, explains the motivation and ambiguity, and notes the author does not declare a single correct reading.

Explain how maintaining a suboptimal body temperature imposes costs on reptiles and amphibians, including predation, reduced performance, and reduced foraging success.

The question infers that the metabolic cost of activity is highest at midday due to extreme temperatures, exceeding costs in the morning and evening.

Analyze how suboptimal temperatures can confer advantages by balancing the costs of activity, illustrated by the leatherback sea turtle in cooler waters.

Desert lizards optimize activity by being active in the morning and again in the evening, balancing heat costs with social interactions to boost mating success and fitness.

Analyze how reptiles and amphibians may perform activity at suboptimal temperatures when the advantages outweigh the costs, guiding interpretation of GMAT reading comprehension questions.

William Jennings Bryan's gold standard critique and the argument that increasing the money supply can trigger inflation, as the author challenges Bryan's stance.

The caption argues that gold supply was not limited, citing the process for extracting pure gold and South African deposits, refuting conclusions about value and metals under the gold standard.

Infer that the author opposes government intervention in exchange rates and favors a free economy, citing Hamilton's fiat attempt and that restraints hinder natural market development.

The lecture analyzes the gold standard debate, arguing that limiting the money supply benefits the wealthy, with historical context from William Jennings Bryan's primitivism and 1896 campaigns.

This lecture analyzes the link between daily coffee consumption and learning, showing caffeine boosts short-term memory and can improve declarative memory, with sensitivity groups influencing results.

Explore how daily coffee consumption may enhance short term memory formation and influence long term memory, while caffeine sensitivities and adverse effects complicate study findings.

Analyze how speech redundancy aids recognition across noisy signals, and how prior linguistic knowledge helps focus on relevant features and distinguish the necessary from the redundant information.

Reveal that purely acoustic analysis only shows which acoustic information exists, not which cues listeners use to recognize songs. Adopt a different approach to understand listener perception.

The lecture explains that acoustic analysis alone cannot reveal listener perception; researchers need a different approach. The author does not prescribe a specific method for studying the phenomenon.

analyze how asteroid rotation rates produce a bell-shaped distribution with a tail for monolithic rocks, while rubble piles would cut off the tail by flying apart at high spins.

Explain how tiny, nearly negligible forces of strength and gravity together hold rubble pile asteroids, clarifying why the rubble pile hypothesis appears conceptually troublesome at first.

Explore how asteroids develop regolith from impacts, and how weak gravity allows loose material to escape, identifying why answer choice B is correct.

Analyze how the passage uses crater size to argue that asteroids are rubble piles rather than monolithic bodies. It shows how this evidence points to choice E as correct.

The reading passage refutes the conventional theory that asteroids are hard and rocky. It argues, with observations and computer modeling, that asteroids are composites, and earlier evidence was misleading.

Explore the rubble hypothesis and how a porous rubble pile on the asteroid Matilda can withstand impacts better than a solid object by absorbing and dissipating energy.

Explore the debate between nativist and empiricist views on color naming, examining innate language wiring, perceptual limits, and how best to justify an answer choice.

Explore the idea that color naming follows a fixed pattern, defending nativist thought that color terms are innately determined by perceptual apparatus rather than external influence.

Explore the development of a linguistic phenomenon, tracing dates 1860 and 1969, and compare three schools of thought (nativist emphases and cultures) to evaluate claims and reach a consensus.

Analyze how the savings and loan deregulation expanded investments, led to bank failures and taxpayer costs, and highlight the need for stronger, better-implemented regulations.

Analyze which statements about the savings and loan crisis are implied, including energy prices, housing booms, deregulation, fraud effects, and government interests.

Practice reading comprehension by identifying the one option not implied by the author in a question about the history of mathematics, including Mesopotamia’s proofs and China’s logical construction.

Identify how some Chinese mathematical histories differ by including explicit proofs rather than merely presenting results, reflecting the modern methodology of justifying every theorem.

Evaluate the author's view on whether skull shape or brain size reveals personality, noting distrust of brain-based inference and critique of linking traits to skull features.

Assess the assumptions linking aptitude and personality to brain structure via skull shape, noting bumps map to brain regions and 40 functions, and identify the claim that is not assumed.

Students analyze Gohl's theory that mental function use enlarges brain areas, pushing the skull to produce a bump, and why option B explains it in question 71.

Analyze the purpose of the first sentence in the second paragraph and compare the Eighth Symphony with Beethoven’s earlier works, highlighting differences, a link to the fifth symphony, and optimism.

This lecture explains that the passage's primary purpose is to compare and contrast Beethoven's eighth symphony with his earlier works, noting differences and similarities.

Examine how Beethoven uses concentration as the organizing principle in the Eighth Symphony, balancing brevity with a densely saturated first movement, and compare it to the Seventh and Fifth.

Identify that classicism emphasizes brevity for its own sake, implying works on a smaller scale, as discussed in the context of Beethoven.

Examine how the author contrasts two approaches to understanding the role of government during the colonial times, clarifying the historical phenomenon and showing how these methods inform each other.

Molly and Jensen place findings on women in colonized countries within a transnational context, offering a comprehensive understanding. In contrast, candidates rely on limited, country-specific evidence and risk broad generalizations.

Offering specific cross-regional examples from Europe and South Asia strengthens the case by showing how a woman's economic activity undermined traditional roles.

Explain that the plurality winner can secure electoral votes, so the national winner isn't always the most popular, and mention critics' approval and rank voting, with the author neutral.

Explore how the passage explains selecting the most popular candidate in a U.S. presidential election across plurality, majority, approval voting, and rank voting, and considers multiple rounds as an alternative.

Analyze the passage's primary purpose, outlining criticisms of election systems, descriptions of alternative methods including ranked voting, and the conclusion that near-term national adoption is unlikely.