Admission Test GRE-Verbal Value Pack (Frequently Bought Together)

Most people think it's fine to be "busy as a beaver." Little do they know. Beavers may work hard, but often
they don't get much done. Beavers are supposed to be great tree cutters. It is true that a beaver can gnaw
through a tree very quickly. (A six-inch birch takes about ten minutes.) But then what? Often the beaver
does not make use of the tree.
One expert says that beavers waste one out of every five trees they cut. For one thing, they do not choose
their trees wisely. One bunch of beavers cut down a cottonwood tree more than one hundred feet tall.
Then they found that they could not move it. In thick woods a tree sometimes won't fall down. It gets stuck
in the other trees. Of course, doesn't think to cut down the trees that are in the way. So a good tree goes
to waste. Some people think that beavers can make a tree fall the way they want it to. Not true. (In fact, a
beaver sometimes gets pinned under a falling tree.) When beavers cut a tree near a stream, it usually falls
into the water. But they do not plan it that way. The fact is that most trees lean toward the water to start
with. Now what about dam building? Most beaver dams are wonders of engineering. The best ones are
strongly built of trees, stones, and mud. They are wide at the bottom and narrow at the top. Beavers think
nothing of building a dam more than two hundred feet long. One dam, in Montana, was more than two
thousand feet long. The largest one ever seen was in New Hampshire. It stretched four thousand feet. It
made a lake large enough to hold forty beaver homes. So beavers do build good dams. But they don't
always build them in the right places. They just don't plan. They will build a dam across the widest part of
the stream. They don't try to find a place where the stream is narrow. So a lot of their hard work is wasted.
Beavers should learn that it's not enough to be busy. You have to know what you're doing, too. For
example, there was one Oregon beaver that really was a worker. It decided to fix a leak in a man-made
dam. After five days of work it gave up. The leak it was trying to block was the lock that boats go through.
What is the main idea of this passage?

• A. Beavers are poor surveyors of aquatic environments in some cases.
• B. Beavers are well developed tree cutters.
• C. Beavers are excellent dam builders.
• D. New Hampshire was the site of the largest beaver dam.
• E. Beavers may be hard working animals, but they don't always choose the most efficient mechanisms.

Conflict had existed between Spain and England since the 1570s. England wanted a share of the wealth
that Spain had been taking from the lands it had claimed in the Americas.
Elizabeth I, Queen of England, encouraged her staunch admiral of the navy, Sir Francis Drake, to raid
Spanish ships and towns. Though these raids were on a small scale, Drake achieved dramatic success,
adding gold and silver to England's treasury and diminishing Spain's omnipotence. Religious differences
also caused conflict between the two countries. Whereas Spain was Roman Catholic, most of England
had become Protestant.
King Philip II of Spain wanted to claim the throne and make England a Catholic country again. To satisfy
his ambition and also to retaliate against England's theft of his gold and silver, King Philip began to build
his fleet of warships, the Armada, in January 1586.
Philip intended his fleet to be indestructible. In addition to building new warships, he marshaled one
hundred and thirty sailing vessels of all types and recruited more than nineteen thousand robust soldiers
and eight thousand sailors. Although some of his ships lacked guns and others lacked ammunition, Philip
was convinced that his Armada could withstand any battle with England. The martial Armada set sail from
Lisbon, Portugal, on May 9,1588, but bad weather forced it back to port. The voyage resumed on July 22
after the weather became more stable. The Spanish fleet met the smaller, faster, and more maneuverable
English ships in battle off the coast of Plymouth, England, first on July 31 and again on August 2. The two
battles left Spain vulnerable, having lost several ships and with its ammunition depleted. On August 7,
while the Armada lay at anchor on the
French side of the Strait of Dover, England sent eight burning ships into the midst of the
Spanish fleet to set it on fire. Blocked on one side, the Spanish ships could only drift away, their crews in
panic and disorder. Before the Armada could regroup, the English attacked again on August 8. Although
the Spaniards made a valiant effort to fight back, the fleet suffered extensive damage. During the eight
hours of battle, the Armada drifted perilously close to the rocky coastline. At the moment when it seemed
that the Spanish ships would be driven onto the English shore, the wind shifted, and the Armada drifted
out into the North Sea. The Spaniards recognized the superiority of the English fleet and returned home,
defeated
The two battles left the Spanish fleet ____.

• A. defeated
• B. discouraged
• C. open to change
• D. triumphant
• E. open to attack

The _______ that computers are _______ educational tools has led many parents to believe that children
don't need to be monitored when using the computer, as they do when watching television.

• A. argument . . effective
• B. hypothesis . . powerful
• C. myth . . inimical
• D. misconception . . benign
• E. belief . . sophisticated

Shakespeare's _______ of Richard III is so _______ that it is difficult to imagine that the ruler had been
dead for more than a century before the Bard cast him as the central character in one of his plays.

• A. rendition . . compelling
• B. criticism . . candid
• C. portrayal . . droll
• D. caricature . . inventive
• E. depiction . . vivid

In the 1970s, the idea of building socalled "New Towns" to absorb growth was considered a potential
cure-all for urban problems in the United States. It was assumed that by diverting residents from existing
centers, current urban problems would at least get no worse. It was also assumed that, since European
New Towns had been financially and socially successful, the same could be expected in the United States.
In the end, these ill-considered projects actually weakened
U.S. cities further by drawing away high-income citizens. While industry and commerce sought in turn to
escape, the lower-income groups left behind were unable to provide the necessary tax base to support
the cities. Not surprisingly, development occurred in areas where land was cheap and construction
profitable rather than where New Towns were genuinely needed. Moreover, the failure on the part of
planners and federal legislators to consider social needs resulted not in the sort of successful New Towns
seen in Britain but in nothing more than sprawling suburbs.
The passage states that New Towns n the United States

• A. provided affluent urban residents an escape from the city
• B. provided models for many of today's urban redevelopment projects
• C. provided a thriving social center away from the problems of the older city
• D. were different than those in Great Britain in certain important respects
• E. spurred economic redevelopment in decaying urban centers