Answer Key: Sample Verbal Reasoning Questions

　　1. Sentence to be completed:  It is truly paradoxical that the Amazon, the lushest of all rainforests, is rooted in the most BLANK of all soils.

　　Answer: D-impoverished, E-infertile

　　2. Sentence to be completed:  Cynics believe that people who BLANK compliments do so in order to be praised twice.

　　Answer: C-deflect, E-shrug off

　　3. Sentence to be completed: A restaurant's menu is generally reflected in its decor; however despite this restaurant's BLANK appearance it is pedestrian in the menu it offers.

　　Answer: A-elegant,  F-chic

　　4. Sentence to be completed:  International financial issues are typically BLANK by the United States media because they are too technical to make snappy headlines and too inaccessible to people who lack a background in economics.

　　Answer: A-neglected, B-slighted

　　5. Sentence to be completed:  While in many ways their personalities could not have been more different-she was ebullient where he was glum, relaxed where he was awkward, garrulous where he was BLANK-they were surprisingly well suited.

　　Answer: D-laconic, F-taciturn

　　6. D-spirituals

　　7. B-They had little working familiarity with such forms of American music as jazz, blues, and popular songs.

　　8. E-neglected Johnson's contribution to classical symphonic music

　　9. C-The editorial policies of some early United States newspapers became a counterweight to proponents of traditional values.

　　10. A-insincerely

　　11. Blank (i)  C-multifaceted

　　Blank (ii)  F-extraneous

　　Answer in Context:  The multifaceted nature of classical tragedy in Athens belies the modern image of tragedy:  in the modern view tragedy is austere and stripped down, its representations of ideological and emotional conflicts so superbly compressed that there's nothing extraneous for time to erode.

　　12. Blank (i)  C-ambivalence

　　Blank (ii)  E-successful

　　Blank (iii)  H-assuage

　　Answer in Context: Murray, whose show of recent paintings and drawings is her best in many years, has been eminent hereabouts for a quarter century, although often regarded with ambivalence, but the most  successful of these paintings assuage all doubts.

　　13. B-a doctrinaire

　　Answer in Context: Far from viewing Jefferson as a skeptical but enlightened intellectual, historians of the 1960's portrayed him as a doctrinaire thinker, eager to fill the young with his political orthodoxy while censoring ideas he did not like.

　　14. C-recapitulates

　　Answer in Context:  Dramatic literature often recapitulates the history of a culture in that it takes as its subject matter the important events that have shaped and guided the culture.

　　15. B-an intellectual

　　Answer in Context:  Although the movement to preserve historic buildings is not usually thought of as an intellectual phenomenon, it deserves mention in the history of ideas because it launched the critique of the ideology of progress.