GRE Critical Reasoning
Critical Reasoning questions test the ability to understand, analyze, and evaluate arguments. Some of the abilities tested by specific questions include identifying the roles played by specific phrases or sentences in an argument, recognizing the point of an argument, recognizing assumptions on which an argument is based" drawing conclusions and forming hypotheses, identifying methods of argumentation, evaluating arguments and counter-arguments, and analyzing evidence.
Each of the Critical Reasoning questions is based on a short argument, a set of statements, or a plan of action. For each question, select the best answer of the choices given.
Grammarians have for years condemned as ungram- matical the English phrase “between you and I, ” insisting that the correct phrasing is “between you and me,” with the objective case after a preposition. Such condemnations, however, are obviously unfounded, because Shakespeare himself, in The Merchant of Venice, wrote, “All debts are cleared between you and I.”
#1
Around 1850 there were about 800 farms in Otsego County. By the 1950’s the number of farms had dropped to around 400. By 1988 there were only 81 farms in operation. Therefore, the amount of land in the county that is devoted to farming has dropped by about 90 percent in the past 140 years.
#2
Senator: Jones is highly qualified for appointment as a judge, as evidenced by Jones’s receiving a unanimous vote of “qualified” on the formal rating scale used by the Lawyers’ Committee. That committee advises the Senate on judicial appointments.
#3
The average life expectancy of the population of Japan has risen steadily since 1960 and is now the highest national average in the world, even though heart disease among the Japanese has increased since they began to eat more of the fatty foods typical of the diets of people in Western countries.
#4
For some women the cost of giving birth can be an unexpectedly large burden. The average normal birth now costs $3,200, and a birth with complications can cost thousands of dollars more. Of women in the primary childbearing age range of eighteen to twenty-four, who account for about 40 percent of all births in this country annually, more than 25 percent have no health-care insurance to pay maternity costs.
#5
One theory of the Moon’s origin is that the Earth, early in its development, was a rapidly rotating body of molten rock in which most of the iron had settled to the core; some of this fluid was cast off from the surface of the spinning mass and later solidified to form the Moon.