All Things Verbal

GRE Text Completion Quiz 2

1. The elderly woman was (i) ______ to have returned to her the ring that she had lost fifty years before in the (ii) ______ waters of the Mississippi River.

dumbfounded
addlepated
enervated
turbid
turgid
tepid

2. Hursthouse, (i) ______ virtue ethicists in general, argues that ethics is properly neither situational nor utilitarian and that one ought to seek out virtue and emulate it rather than base one’s judgments on subjective concerns or a (ii) ______ weighing of pain and pleasure likely to result from a given action; critics, of course, tend to (iii) ______ that Hursthouse and other virtue ethicists who seek to define virtue merely seek to enshrine their own prejudices under the guise of theory.

enigmatic to
breaking away from
emblematic of
pragmatic
quixotic
grandiloquent
posit
deny
cajole

3. The film was (i) ______ (ii) ______ by critics; not a single reviewer had any positive thing to say about it.

warily
mendaciously
roundly
lauded
panned
venerated

4. Socrates advocated a life of moderation: live (i) ______, drink (ii) ______, and (iii) ______.

apathetically
lavishly
modestly
sparingly
copiously
brusquely
fight for one’s beliefs
do nothing to excess
remain inscrutable always

5. After the US Civil War, “carpetbaggers”—so-called because they carried suitcases made of inexpensive carpeting material— ______ the South, hoping to turn a quick profit.

inundated
vanquished
blacklisted
boycotted
berated

6. December’s earthquake was but a ______ to a terrible year for a small island nation recently wracked by civil strife and devastating tropical storms.

prologue
catharsis
coda
homily
rampage

7. Although they had never met, the two writers felt they were of one mind, each (i) ______ anticipating the contents of the other’s letters; never had two intellectuals been more (ii) ______.

ominously
anachronistically
presciently
providential
shrewd
simpatico

8. After many years of war and bloodshed, some became ______ suffering, casting a blind eye to scenes of misery around them.

inured to
exempted from
dominant over
effusive towards
maudlin over

9. After a brief initial struggle over power, the group elected a leader and ______ into a surprisingly harmonious team.

fractured
syncopated
coalesced
agglomerated
amortized

10. The director inserted deliberate ______ into the play—for example, Hamlet typed his letters to Ophelia on a laptop.

platitudes
paradigms
neologisms
derivations
anachronisms

11. The ancient tablet presents a true ______: none have been able to decode it.

gem
stanza
quagmire
enigma
incentive

12. According to supporters of progressive taxation, the payment of higher tax rates by those with higher incomes, those who (i) ______ such taxation systems tend to fall into two camps: the (ii) ______, who feel it unjust that the “most industrious” among us are “penalized” for their success, and the (iii) ______, who argue that higher taxes on the rich will harm us all by dampening the entrepreneurial spirit that drives the economy.

rail against
vote for
depredate
autodidacts
moralists
recidivists
libertines
utilitarians
myrmidons

13. Just as reminiscences of a childhood spent in rural Mexico color the poet’s work, so too does the experience of war ______ her poetry.

inform
mimic
invalidate
defer
presage

14. The peanut is often (i) ______ referred to as a nut; (ii) ______ to such people, it is actually a legume.

archaically
erroneously
abhorrent
unbeknownst
abhorrent