Admission Tests GRE Exam Questions : GRE General Test

W. E. B. Du Bois's exhibit of African American history and culture at the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle attracted the attention of a world of sociological scholarship whose values his work challenged. Du Bois believed that sociological sociologists failed in their attempts to gain greater understanding of human deeds because their work examined not deeds but theories and because they gathered data not to effect social progress but merely to theorize. In his exhibit. Du Bois sought to present cultural artifacts that would shift the focus of sociology from the construction of vast generalizations to die observation of particular. living individual elements of society and the working contributions of individual people to a vast functioning social structure.
The passage implies that Du Bois attributed which of the following beliefs to Spencerian sociologists?

• A. Theorizing is important to the understanding of human actions.
• B. Sociology should focus on the living elements of society rather than cultural artifacts.
• C. Vast generalizations have limited value.
• D. Particulars are more important than universals.
• E. Data gathering is a relatively unimportant part of sociological research.

Experimental magazine essays are quite in vogue, but many of the characteristic that now seem innovative will doubtless look (1)________in thirty years" time; a vaunted self-consciousness will look affected, a fractured style, far from appearing (ii)________ will appear (lii)________instead.

• A. mannered
• B. idiosyncratic
• C. pretentious
• D. auspicious
• E. foreign
• F. radical
• G. conventional
• H. quaint
• I. groundbreaking

W. E. B. Du Bois's exhibit of African American history and culture at the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle attracted the attention of a world of sociological scholarship whose values his work challenged. Du Bois believed that sociological sociologists failed in their attempts to gain greater understanding of human deeds because their work examined not deeds but theories and because they gathered data not to effect social progress but merely to theorize. In his exhibit. Du Bois sought to present cultural artifacts that would shift the focus of sociology from the construction of vast generalizations to die observation of particular. living individual elements of society and the working contributions of individual people to a vast functioning social structure.
The passage implies that Du Bois believed which of the following statements about sociology?

• A. It should contribute to the betterment of society.
• B. It should focus on how existing social structures determine individual behavior.
• C. It should study what people actually do.

One of the remarkable things about (i)________is that it can seem so (li)________: many of the issues about which people (iii)________seem, to the nonzealot. to be gray and ambiguous at the core.

• A. erudition
• B. conviction
• C. feel absolute certainty
• D. fail to educate themselves
• E. self-serving
• F. benign
• G. duplicity
• H. unreasonable
• I. find themselves puzzled

Some archaeologists speculate that the Americas might have been initially colonized between 40.000 and
25.000 years ago. However, to support this theory it is necessary to explain the absence of generally accepted habitation sites for that time interval in what is now the United States. Australia, which has a smaller land area than the United States, has many such sites, supporting the generally accepted claim that the continent was colonized by humans at least 40.000 years ago. Australia is less densely populated (resulting in lower chances of discovering sites) and with its overall greater aridity would have presented conditions less favorable for hunter-gatherer occupation. Proportionally, at least as much land area has been lost from the coastal regions of Australia because of postglacial sea-level rise as in the United States, so any coastal archaeological record in Australia should have been depleted about as much as a coastal record in the United States. Since there are so many resource-rich rivers leading inland from the United States coastline, it seems implausible that a growing population of humans would have confined itself to coasts for thousands of years. If inhabitants were present
25.000 years ago. the chances of their appearing in the archaeological record would seem to be greater than for Australia.
The author of the passage notes Australia's "smaller land area" in order to

• A. indicate that Australia is not exactly comparable to the United States in size
• B. help explain a difference between Australia and the United States in the number of habitation sites from between 40.000 and 25.000 years ago
• C. suggest that the number of habitation sites from between 40.000 and 25.000 years ago that have been found in Australia is somewhat surprising
• D. emphasize a difference between Australia and the United States in population density
• E. help show why the absence of habitation sites from between 40.000 and 25.000 years ago in what is now the United States is problematic