一、GRE General Test基础测试之「词汇」作答说明

Against this tragic backdrop, the Virginia Company of London gave a patent to some merchants headed by Thomas Weston for a settlement.

The $70 billion Japanese trade surplus with the U.S. is dwarfed by China’s $379 billion surplus, and the trade tensions between Washington and Tokyo are far less contentious than the tariffs war with Beijing.

The judge’s standing in the legal community, though shaken by phony allegations of wrongdoing, emerged, at long last, undamaged.

Just as Newton inspired the scientific bent of Enlightenment intellectuals, English philosopher John Locke, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), led many to embrace “reasonable” or “rational” religion.

After the 20-year-old college student’s grades plummeted in the fall, his father enrolled him in a private treatment program costing thousands of dollars a month.

Combining ivory, bone, and other materials, they fashioned harpoons and spears for the pursuit of sea mammals and—in the case of the Inuits—caribou.

A father’s authority over his family supposedly mirrored God’s rule over Creation and the king’s over his subjects.

After finding that both the land and inhabitants in Nova Scotia were inhospitable, many blacks moved from there to the new British colony of Sierra Leone in West Africa.

While denouncing Protestants, the council reformed Church administration to combat corruption and broaden public participation in religious observances.

When the pope censured him, Luther broadened his criticism to encompass the Mass, purgatory, priests, and the papacy.

二、GRE General Test基础测试之「句子」作答说明

Having finally reached a tentative labor agreement with its company’s pilots, the airline’s board of directors must now determine how the airline can both increase profits and compete more effectively for customers than it did in the past.

After analyzing data gathered by weather satellites, scientists report that the Earth’s northern latitudes have become about ten percent greener since 1980, due to more vigorous plant growth associated with warmer temperatures and higher levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Humans have been damaging the environment for centuries by over-cutting trees and farming too intensively, and though some protective measures, such as the establishment of national forests and wildlife sanctuaries, were taken decades ago, great increases in population and in the intensity of industrialization are causing a worldwide ecological crisis.

Early studies often concluded that the public was susceptible to the propagandistic influence of mass communications, but one recent study indicates that mass communications seldom produce marked changes in social attitudes or actions.

While some protective measures, such as the establishment of national forests and wildlife sanctuaries, were taken decades ago, great increases in population and in the intensity of industrialization are causing a worldwide ecological crisis.

The government predicts that the Federal Communications Commission’s recent telephone rate cuts will greatly reduce costs, though some consumer groups disagree with the government’s estimates, suggesting they are too optimistic.

Transplanting gut microbes from the twins into lab mice that develop MS, they found that more of the mice receiving the MS micro-biome developed a mouse version of MS than did mice receiving transplants from the healthy twin.

The delinquency rates on mortgages for office buildings, hotels, shopping malls, and other commercial properties held by the nation’s insurance companies have increased sharply in recent months, leading to predictions that foreclosures on these types of loans could double over the next three years.

Many researchers attribute the large number of physiological and behavioral similarities between birds and mammals, which have separate evolutionary histories, to endothermy—a thermoregulatory strategy whereby warm body temperature is maintained through internal heat sources.

Alternatively, probiotics that preferentially nourish bacteria that compete with the MS-causing kinds might keep the latter in check, Baranzini said, though he cautioned that probiotics have not yet been shown to cause the wholesale micro-biome changes that might be needed to prevent or cure disease.

三、GRE General Test基础测试之「段落-Conclusion」作答说明

Geographers and historians have traditionally held the view that Antarctica was first sighted around 1820, but some sixteenth-century European maps show a body that resembles the polar landmass, even though explorers of the period never saw it. Some scholars, therefore, argue that the continent must have been discovered and mapped by the ancients, whose maps are known to have served as models for the European cartographers.

The overall operating costs borne by many small farmers are reduced when the farmers eliminate expensive commercial chemical fertilizers and pesticides in favor of crop rotation and the twice-yearly use of manure as fertilizer. Therefore, large farmers should adopt the same measures. They will then realize even greater total savings than do the small farmers.

In 1985 a consumer agency concluded that Xylo brand bicycles are safer to ride than are Zenon brand bicycles. The agency based the conclusion on the ratio of the number of rider injuries to the number of riding hours for each brand of bicycle from 1981 through 1984. Yet for identically designed bicycles manufactured since 1985, the number of rider injuries has been twice as great among riders of Xylos as among riders of Zenons. Therefore, the agenoy’s conclusion would have been different for the period since 1985.

Some insects are able to feed on the leaves of milk-weed, a toxic plant, by first cutting and draining the vein that secretes the toxin. This method of detoxification guarantees that some insects will always be able to eat milkweed, because the plant could never evolve to produce a toxin that is lethal in the trace amounts left after the vein is cut.

A recent study of an insurance company’s under- writers indicated that those who worked in pleasant physical surroundings were 25 percent more productive than their peers in unpleasant physical surroundings. Objective criteria for evaluating job performance included caseload and complexity of cases. This shows that improving workers’ environments increases those workers’ productivity.

One of the world’s most celebrated paintings, The Man with the Golden Helmet, long attributed to Rembrandt, is not a Rembrandt after all. So say several art experts, who base their conclusion on an analysis of stylistic features, especially details both of shading and of brushwork. In order to ascertain who really painted the well-known masterpiece, the experts have begun a series of sophisticated new tests, including one that involves the activation of neutrons. These tests yield patterns for any painter that are as distinctive as a good set of fingerprints.

四、GRE General Test基础测试之「段落-Logic」作答说明

1. These regions are especially likely to have periods of severe dryness, so that crop failures are common.
2. Four specific activities have been identified as major contributors to the desertification processes: over-cultivation, overgrazing, firewood gathering, and over-irrigation.
3. The cultivation of crops has expanded into progressively drier regions as population densities have grown.
4. Since the raising of most crops necessitates the prior removal of the natural vegetation, crop failures leave extensive tracts of land devoid of a plant cover and susceptible to wind and water erosion.

1. In 1979, a team looking for fossils in northern Pakistan found what proved to be the oldest fossil whale.
2. Very exciting discoveries have finally allowed scientists to reconstruct the most likely origins of cetaceans.
3. Several skeletons of another early whale, Basilosaurus, were found in sediments left by the Tethys Sea and now exposed in the Sahara desert.
4. Another major discovery was made in Egypt in 1989.
5. An even more exciting find was reported in 1994, also from Pakistan.
6. The now extinct whale Ambulocetus natans lived in the Tethys Sea 49 million years ago.

1. This whale lived around 40 million years ago, 12 million years after Pakicetus.
2. Several skeletons of another early whale, Basilosaurus, were found in sediments left by the Tethys Sea and now exposed in the Sahara desert.
3. Another major discovery was made in Egypt in 1989.
4. Many incomplete skeletons were found but they included, for the first time in an archaeocyte, a complete hind leg that features a foot with three tiny toes.
5. Basilosaurus was undoubtedly a fully marine whale with possibly nonfunctional, or vestigial, hind legs.
6. Such legs would have been far too small to have supported the 50-foot-long Basilosaurus on land.

1. Storytelling has been proposed as one alternative.
2. Although origin in ritual has long been the most popular, it is by no means the only theory about how the theater came into being.
3. To enhance their listeners’ enjoyment, storytellers continually make their stories more engaging and memorable.
4. Thus, the recalling of an event (a hunt, battle, or other feat) is elaborated through the narrator’s pantomime and impersonation and eventually through each role being assumed by a different person.
5. Under this theory, relating and listening to stories are seen as fundamental human pleasures.

1. In seeking to describe the origins of theater, one must rely primarily on speculation, since there is little concrete evidence on which to draw.
2. The process perceived by these anthropologists may be summarized briefly.
3. The most widely accepted theory, championed by anthropologists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, envisions theater as emerging out of myth and ritual.
4. Having little understanding of natural causes, it attributes both desirable and undesirable occurrences to supernatural or magical forces, and it searches for means to win the favor of these forces.
5. Perceiving an apparent connection between certain actions performed by the group and the result it desires, the group repeats, refines and formalizes those actions into fixed ceremonies, or rituals.
6. During the early stages of its development, a society becomes aware of forces that appear to influence or control its food supply and well-being.