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.
Despite the fact that the health-inspection procedures for catering establishments are more stringent than those for ordinary restaurants, more of the cases of food poisoning reported to the city health department were brought on by banquets served by catering services than were brought on by restaurant meals.
#1
Dear Editor: Jones’s new book has the potential to destroy reputations of persons who have held high governmental responsibility during national crises. However, readers should dismiss Jones’s criticisms. Jones’s antigovernment attitude is well known, and his criticisms will convince only those like himself, persons who have never had real responsibility and never will, and hence are not qualified to judge.
#2
I. Neither Peter nor Sarah has any common sense.
II. Neither Peter nor Sarah is able to run the factory.
#3
If we employ a broad definition of what is urban-that is, one that includes suburbs- about 33,000 square miles of land in the United States were converted from rural to urban uses in the 1960’s and 1970·s. From 1960 to 1980 the area of urban settlement increased by 84 percent while the urban population increased by 33 percent.
#4
Praising a historian for factual accuracy in describing events is like praising an architect for using well-seasoned timber or properly mixed concrete in a building.
#5
Masterpieces of literature are “intertextual”; that is, they tend to be written in response not to reality but to other works of literature. To the extent that a writing is intertextual, it becomes clouded as a mirror of social reality.