Module I: Reading and Writing

timer
Although our knowledge of the Pleistocene epoch and the lives of hominids during this time was once obscure, recent analysis of fossils like that of the individual known as Petralona 1, discovered in Greece in 1960, have sharpened our picture of what a day in the life of Petralona 1 may have looked like.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word?
1
Mark for Review
unprecedented
nebulous
intricate
concrete
Text corpora such as the American National Corpus are enormous collections of electronically stored texts that can be used for empirical testing of hypotheses regarding how ____ a word is spoken and written in English. For instance, one might have a guess about the incidence of the word “long,” but only an analysis of a corpus can prove that “long” is the fifth most commonly used adjective.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word?
2
Mark for Review
credible
pervasive
profound
assertive
Authors like Laura Esquivel contributed to the outpouring of Mexican literature in the years following the Mexican Revolution, which lasted from 1910–1920. Works from this period make up an ____ proportion of what is considered the canon of Mexican literature, but nineteenth-century writers like Justo Sierra O’Reilly should be considered just as integral to the Mexican literary canon.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word?
3
Mark for Review
overlooked
outsized
unspecified
erratic
In the late 1970s, the price of collectible stamps from earlier in the century rose dramatically, which had the counterintuitive effect of ____ demand: buyers who hadn’t previously wanted to purchase old stamps suddenly thronged the market, believing prices would continue to rise and the stamps could be resold later at a profit.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word?
4
Mark for Review
exploiting
precipitating
monetizing
stabilizing
Buenos Aires has high pedestrian traffic, but simply replicating a feature of Buenos Aires associated with walkability—e.g., its high concentration of shaded streets—may be insufficient to induce increased walking in other cities. As urbanist Mariela Alfonzo argues, our understanding of individuals’ decision-making about whether to walk is insufficiently robust: some studies emphasize the role of individual physical fitness, others the role of population density, and so on, but walking decisions are made in complex contexts in which multiple conditions and needs influence individuals’ choices.
Which choice best states the main purpose of the text?
5
Mark for Review
To present a claim about how individuals’ decision-making about walking can be improved
To explain why it is challenging to compare the amount of pedestrian traffic in different cities
To describe the effect of a high concentration of shaded streets on any given city’s walkability
To discuss the difficulty of identifying a reliable way to increase walking in any given city
logo

Guest