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The Reading Comprehension format is one of four basic ones used for GRE Verbal questions. This page lists key features of GRE Reading Comprehension questions. It also provides the test directions for this question format, a sample question (along with a tip for answering it), and a detailed analysis of the sample.
GRE Reading Comprehension — Format, Skills Tested, and Test Directions
Here are the key "specs" for GRE Reading Comprehension questions:
HOW MANY: 8 questions altogether (3 passages of text, 2-4 questions per passage)
WHERE: In the 30-minute Verbal section, mixed with Sentence Completions, Analogies, and Antonym questions
FORMAT: Multiple-choice (you select one of 5 choices by clicking on an oval)
SKILLS TESTED: Your ability to read carefully and accurately, to determine the relationships among the various parts of the passage, and to draw reasonable inferences the material in the passage
DIRECTIONS: Here are the directions for GRE Reading Comprehension questions. These directions will appear on your screen just before your first Reading Comprehension set (and you can access them while tackling any Reading Comprehension question by clicking on the HELP button).
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Directions: This passage is accompanied by questions about its content. Select the best answer to each question among the five choices. Answer all questions on the basis of what the passage states or implies.
To review these directions for subsequent questions of this type, click on HELP. |
Sample GRE Reading Comprehension Question
The following passage is typical of short GRE passages. The question based on the passage is typical but is somewhat easier than average; about 70% of GRE test testers would select the best answer choice. (You can select an answer choice by clicking on it.)
Influenced by Evangelical attitudes, art and literature of the nineteenth century were expected to contribute to moral education. Running afoul of that expectation was the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB), which invited the vituperations of reviewers of its day. Being "retrogressive" in a progressive era may be a serious fault, according to Charles Dickens' rhetoric about the art of John Millais; but being "fleshly" and "aesthetic" in an age of moral earnestness may be worse, as D. G. Rossetti, another PRB ringleader, discovered when poet and critic Robert Buchanan attacked him and his work in "The Fleshly School of Poetry" (1871).
However much the PRB had offended the establishment, most of the brothers had insisted on the importance of the arts as moral guides. Yet Rossetti had expressed doubts about art designed to be morally uplifting: the painter-hero of his short story "Hand and Soul" (1850) tries through art to inspire "moral greatness," only to witness his frescoes of Peace spattered by blood shed in a vendetta. And, privileging form at the expense of meaningful content and animal passion at the expense of conventional morality, the poems and Rossetti himself, Buchanan wrote, were "never spiritual, never tender, always self-conscious and aesthetic."
Q: According to the passage, Rossetti's poems
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Quick Tip for Sample Question
This question focuses only on a small portion of the passage; so don't be distracted by (wrong) answer choices that refer to information appearing elsewhere in the passage — and that have nothing to do with Rossetti's poems.
Analysis of Sample Question
The first answer choice confuses Buchanan's criticism of Rossetti's poems (at the end of the second paragraph) with Dickens' criticism of the work of Millais (in the first paragraph). The second answer choice is a poor response in two respects. First, it confuses the information in the passage, which mentions one of Rossetti's short stories ("Hand and Soul"), not his poems, as portraying violence. Secondly, the passage neither states nor implies that Rossetti's poems violated particular aesthetic ideals — to the contrary, the passage indicates that Buchanan accuses Rossetti of being overly aesthetic. The third answer choice finds some support in the passage — specifically, in the assertion that Rossetti, unlike his fellow PRB brothers, was suspicious about art designed to be morally uplifting. This assertion does suggest a clear difference of opinion between Rossetti and the other PRB members. However, the assertion that Rossetti "rejected" the basic PRB tenets is an unfair, exaggerated characterization of that disagreement. The fourth answer choice is the best one. The final sentence of the passage indicates that Buchanan (a critic of Rossetti) criticized Rossetti's poems for "privileging form at the expense of meaningful content" — in other words, for stressing form over substance. The fifth answer choice is unsupported in the passage, which mentions no specific behavior that Rossetti's poems might have advocated. The only "behavior" portrayed in a Rossetti work and that the passage mentions involves the bloody vendetta — in Rossetti's short story "Hand and Soul." But the passage neither states nor suggests that Rossetti sought to advocate such behavior.
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