twerenowtodie

I'm just surprised, that's all! :). I don't know what to say. Delete the post? Would if I could!

I don't see anybody answering!!!

I guess jocular encouragement in a jocularly presented exercise is nice

want to give me some answers? and way to be nice to me after my work!??! i put thought into this... the sentences are all drawn from esteemed writers and are excerpted from the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, and other well-respected journals

I have surmised that ETS likes to take sentences from excellent writers, modify them somewhat, and put blanks in there. They then create traps for the unsuspecting and gullible. Here are some homemade imitations; they are somewhat more lexical than ETS's, but perhaps I have a future working for them. Let me know what you think: perhaps they're not as hard as I wanted to make them. Russell happened to head that inner (i) ––––––––– of power within the Senate in which, through the genteel workings of the seniority system, it was as if the South, having lost the battlefield, had then proceeded patiently to reverse that verdict with its senators and congressmen (ii) ———————- through the years, through the folk loyalties of the tribal politics back home, to ultimately (iii) ——————- the Capitol. (i) crutch conclave cenacle (ii) fighting towering abiding (iii) abrogate appropriate give up A conceptual mess can persist indefinitely, however, if its very muddle allows (i) —————- illusions to be (ii)—————. (i) cherished acceptable nuanced (ii) discarded neglected retained As one of the four talented, (i) ------------- officers he differed greatly from the other three, who at times were diffident and deferential. Assertive, sometimes even (ii) --------------, he was clearly far more (iii) --------------. (i) choice unregenerate fashionable (ii) gaudy bumptious restrained (iii) gifted ambitious parochial Perhaps the (i) ————— part of Johnson’s campaign of ingratiation began with his debut speech on the floor of the Senate, in which he strenuously (ii)—————— Truman’s civil rights bill to end lynchings and job and voting discrimination, announcing himself one of “We of the South”––though, in truth, Texas and the bare hill country of Johnson’s own origins had always amounted to a(n) (iii) ——————- of the culture of the Old South. (i) most memorable tawdriest most lurid (ii) campaigned for promulgated denounced (iii) outskirt paragon scion Now, this lofty view of myself had nothing to do with any work that I had accomplished. It was a fantasy based on the mark I intended to make in the world, and faced with the challenge of real life, the fantasy soon (i) ————— from a powerful (ii) —————- into the merest whispered (iii) ———————. (i) dwindled waxed ebbed (ii) boast spell conviction (iii) banality disinclination velleity He tended not so much to dissemble in a premeditated way as to (i) ——————- himself into one character or another, according to the moment. Aides would even hear him behind the door of his inner office rehearsing for a contentious meeting by (ii) —————- not only his own arguments but the rejoinders of others, actually (iii) —————- the whole expected exchange himself. (i) fortify transmute maintain (ii) regurgitating remonstrating with voicing out (iii) extemporizing conducting unveiling Both Pennock and Miller demonstrate that evolution is not a designer but a scavenger that makes do with (i) ————- solutions and then improves them as opportunities and emergencies present themselves. Typically, the new mechanism will have discarded “scaffolding” elements that were no longer needed. And (ii) —————, a part that may have been only mildly beneficial in one machine can become (iii) ————— to its successor which may serve a quite different end. (i) jury-rigged ad libbed rehashed (ii) on the same lines conversely concomitantly (iii) peripheral deleterious essential The proper way to assess any theory is to weigh its explanatory advantages against those of every (i) ————- rival. Neo-Darwinian natural selection is endlessly fruitful, enjoying (ii) ——————— from an imposing array of disciplines. By contrast, intelligent design lacks any naturalistic causal hypotheses and thus enjoys no (iii) —————- with any branch of science. (i) extant proven archaic (ii) relegation corroboration provocation (iii) consilience discordance pact Despite Dr Jones’ position that pandemics are optional, the (i) ________________ view in global health is that pandemics are (ii) ________________. (i) scientific vulgar prevailing (ii) inevitable preventable unwarranted (i) ____________ in his oscillations of mood to a lugubrious (ii) _____________, President Johnson while president brooded (iii) _____________ over how he was discounted by the intellectual left as a blustering boor. (i) Amenable Given Inimical (ii) fly-by-night-hood happy-go-lucky-ness woebegoneness (iii) effusively ponderously egregiously Over those expanses of prose, one baffilingly encounters profusely detailed but strangely (i) _____________ stretches–––including an opening hundred-page exploration of the evolution of the Senate––in which the subject of the biography (ii) ____________ virtually out of sight. Although there are some arresting scenes in the book, they mostly (iii) ______________ what turn out to be essentially pseudo-happenings. (i) prosaic hefty weightless (ii) recedes sublimates absconds (iii) recount rehash decorate The author is working here in a rare genre––appreciation of an appreciative writer—with temptations known only to those who have tried it: a drift toward (i) ———— insistence, making the author (ii) —————— he scarcely noticed; or, by reaction to the other extreme, superstitious trust in the healing virtue of a(n) (iii) ————— quotation. (i) refractory extreme suasive (ii) toe a line retrace his steps fall by the wayside (iii) aesthetic mere lurid We met in his apartment to discuss his process: how he finds the books he publishes, and what provokes his interest. He has a soft-spoken manner and a reader’s excellent (i) —————— vocabulary, but he clearly enjoys regular (ii) —————— loud laughter, provoked by his (iii) ———————- bone-dry sense of humor. (i) dispatch of want of restraint in (ii) abeyances in guffaws of punctuations of (iii) knowing callous jejune

I think the concordance between the old GRE and the new GRE is somewhat suspect. Though this is probably a moot point by now, I was curious if anyone else had such a suspicion. I was going to take the GRE in 2011 and I was deciding between the old and new one. The timing was really bad because I was out of the country and I'd only have 2 or 3 days to take the old one. I went with the new one because it seemed easier somehow (I don't know why). I really wish I had taken the old one: on old practice tests, and in the GRE Big Book, my verbal scores were always well into the 99th percentile: 760, 800, 800, 790, 750, 770, 790, 800. All of these are converted to a 170 in today's scoring system (except the 750 would be 169). On test day, they gave me the estimate of 750-800 (they hadn't yet calibrated the scoring), which corresponded to my old GRE performances so I thought that was appropriate. I ended up getting a 168. Now this is of course by no means a bad score. But it frustrated me because I always, consistently, had gotten 750+ in old GRE tests, and it seemed as though I had just missed one or two questions. A 168 corresponds to 720-730, which is in fact somewhat below average at the most elite verbally oriented graduate programs. It seems to me that 40 questions doesn't give you enough room to make fine, precise distinctions. (The old paper GRE had 76 Verbal questions: that seems much better.) It's easy to make a simple mistake, or even to disagree with the way in which the question and answer are worded (for example, the "choose separately and select all that apply" questions can be highly deceptive). I often avoid a correct answer choice because I think the grammar or diction of the correct answer choice are incorrect. It seems to me that it's no longer really a test of verbal ability, but a test of "trickiness-catching." Do you know the tricky little ways the test makers write questions? There's only 40 questions, so if you get "tricked" more than once your score can go down very quickly. The math concordance is even stranger: on test day they gave me an estimate of 730-800. This was fine with me, too, as I was usually 720-750 Q in practice tests (I had gotten an 800 Math SAT in high school, but had since forgotten most of it and was just relying on memory). That became a 158! I'm sorry but 158/170 looks way worse than 730/800, and I think they should have been more transparent about the difference, as I would have studied more since that 12 point loss may have cost me a university-wide fellowship nomination. It seems that in order to establish the concordance, ETS simply mapped the latest percentiles of the 130-170 system onto the old percentiles. But I think the tests are somewhat incompatible. The Verbal tests you on reading a seriously 100 to 150 word paragraph and throws tricky questions at you to make you think you didn't understand a simple paragraph. The old GRE tested long-acquired, deep lexical knowledge of English and passages of more complexity and with less of a reliance on chicanery. I wonder if anyone else longs for the old system (in which I looked much better: a 730-800Q and 750-800V [range: 1480-1600] is much better than a 158Q and a 168V. I am going to retake to raise the Q as I may apply to another graduate program. I also don't understand how someone who graduated summa cum laude from a top university (top 3) and is in a top humanities graduate program can get questions "wrong" on the basis of 150 word paragraphs about the mating patterns of beetles. I hate this test so much! Bring back the old one!