GRE Exam Prep FREE Sample Exam — Fixed Set

If f(x) = 4x + 1 and g(x) = 5x + 7, what is the value of f(g(7))?

A worker earns $20 per hour. How much does the worker earn for 8 hours of work, in dollars?

What is the range of the data set 17, 17, 15, 6, 29, 39, 6?

Two parallel lines are cut by a transversal. One interior angle on a given side of the transversal measures 138 degrees. What is the measure of the same-side interior angle on that same side, in degrees?

In a survey of 36 people, 25% chose option X.
Quantity A: The number of people who chose option X
Quantity B: The number 9

A square has side of length 11.
Quantity A: The perimeter of the square
Quantity B: The area of the square

The stranger is modernity’s characteristic figure: the person who is near without belonging, present in the city but not of it. Sociology’s founding accounts treated the stranger as a problem of knowledge — how can a society cohere among people who do not know one another? — and its later accounts as a liberation: the stranger’s freedom from local ties purchases objectivity, the trader’s and the judge’s and the confidant’s advantage of hearing what intimates cannot say to one another. Cities run on this doubleness. Their commerce needs the stranger’s credit; their conversation needs the stranger’s ear; their safety, paradoxically, needs the stranger’s eye, the anonymous witness whose presence disciplines the street. The contemporary nostalgia for the village — for a world without strangers — should be read against the bill: villages know everyone, and are governed, in part, by the impossibility of escaping what everyone knows.

The passage states that a city’s safety depends paradoxically on

American English spelling owes its distinctive economy to a schoolteacher’s ambition. Noah Webster, compiling his speller and then his dictionary in the young republic, argued that a new nation needed a language of its own, and that American usage should be regularized on rational principles: honor without the u, center with the er, defense with an s. Not all his proposals survived — he would have had tongue as tung and women as wimmen — and the ones that did were mostly ratifications of simplifications already drifting through American print. Webster’s genius was institutional rather than linguistic. His speller, sold in the tens of millions, put his version of English on the school desks of a continent for two generations, so that the reforms he chose became the spellings American children were beaten for getting wrong. Nations are imagined, the saying goes; sometimes they are also spelled.

According to the passage, which of Webster’s proposed spellings failed to survive?

Photosynthesis is usually praised as the engine of the biosphere, but as engineering it is strikingly inefficient: even under ideal conditions, a leaf converts only about five percent of incoming sunlight into chemical energy, and field crops manage one or two. The bottleneck is an enzyme. Rubisco, which captures carbon dioxide for the Calvin cycle, is slow — a few reactions per second where typical enzymes manage thousands — and sloppy: it mistakes oxygen for carbon dioxide a fifth of the time, undoing its own work in a wasteful process called photorespiration. Evolution’s workarounds are visible in corn and sugarcane, whose cells first fix carbon into a four-carbon compound and deliver it concentrated to Rubisco, muffling the oxygen error. Engineers now attempt the same trick for rice and wheat by gene transfer. The prize is large precisely because the enzyme is old: Rubisco evolved when the air held little oxygen, and it has been compensating for a changed atmosphere ever since.

Which of the following most accurately describes the main idea of the passage?

The valley fog was ______ that morning: the far ridge vanished, then the near one.

The judge’s chambers were ______: bare walls, a plain desk, and not a single ornament.

The village was ______ (i) in population and ______ (ii) in territory, a few hundred people spread over miles of farms.