Admission Tests GRE General Test Sample Questions:

1. What accounts for the low-lying. Hat surface of Mars's north? On Earth's surface, higher- and lower-lying areas have different types of crust: one. thin and dense, is pulled toward Earth's center more strongly by gravity, and the planet's water naturally comes to sit over it. creating oceans. The processes that generate this oceanic crust drive plate tectonics.
Is Mars's north similarly characterized by a sort of crust different from other areas of the planet? Some researchers do see signs of tectonic activity surrounding the northern basin that suggest that it was created through the formation of new crust, like ocean basins on Earth. However. McGill points to northern bedrock structures that predate the features said to mark the start of the tectonic process. McGill instead believes that through some novel mechanism the ancient surface sank to its current depth as a single unit. This would explain why features around the basin's edge. which would have formed as the surface dropped, seem to be younger than structures at its floor.
The third possibility is that the northern lowlands result from impacts. Some researchers suggest they formed as a series of big overlapping impact craters. Others, arguing that the odds against such a pattern of impacts are large, postulate a single event-the impact of an object bigger than any asteroid the solar system now contains.
As presented in the passage. McGill's account of the formation of Mars's northern basin differs from the others mentioned in that it alone

A) explains the formation of certain northern bedrock features
B) takes the northern basin to be a landform that is not analogous to any found on Earth
C) does no! specify the force that caused the northern basin to be lower than its surroundings
D) attributes the creation of the northern lowlands to processes occurring within the planet
E) denies that features around the northern basin are the result of tectonic activity

2. How many fnsi-ye.it students did 112! take the placemen! exam in 1995 ?

A) 63
B) 66
C) 70
D) 73
E) 57

3.
The sequence a1, a2, a3 ,,,,an is defined by

A) The two quantities are equal.
B) Quantity A is greater.
C) The relationship cannot be determined from the information given.
D) Quantity B is greater.

4. W. E. B. Du Bois's exhibit of African American history and culture at the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle attracted the attention of a world of sociological scholarship whose values his work challenged. Du Bois believed that sociological sociologists failed in their attempts to gain greater understanding of human deeds because their work examined not deeds but theories and because they gathered data not to effect social progress but merely to theorize. In his exhibit. Du Bois sought to present cultural artifacts that would shift the focus of sociology from the construction of vast generalizations to die observation of particular. living individual elements of society and the working contributions of individual people to a vast functioning social structure.
The passage implies that Du Bois believed which of the following statements about sociology?

A) It should study what people actually do.
B) It should focus on how existing social structures determine individual behavior.
C) It should contribute to the betterment of society.

5. Experimental magazine essays are quite in vogue, but many of the characteristic that now seem innovative will doubtless look (1)________in thirty years" time; a vaunted self-consciousness will look affected, a fractured style, far from appearing (ii)________ will appear (lii)________instead.

A) radical
B) mannered
C) groundbreaking
D) foreign
E) auspicious
F) conventional
G) pretentious
H) quaint
I) idiosyncratic

Solutions: