GMAT Reading Comprehension Practice Test 01

Should we really care for the greatest actors of the past could we have them before us? Should we find them too different from our accent of thought, of feeling, of speech, in a thousand minute particulars which are of the essence of all three? Dr. Doran's long and interesting records of the triumphs of Garrick, and other less familiar, but in their day hardly less astonishing, players, do not relieve one of the doubt. Garrick himself, as sometimes happens with people who have been the subject of much anecdote and other conversation, here as elsewhere, bears no very distinct figure. One hardly sees the wood for the trees. On the other hand, the account of Betterton, "perhaps the greatest of English actors," is delightfully fresh. That intimate friend of Dryden, Tillatson, Pope, who executed a copy of the actor's portrait by Kneller which is still extant, was worthy of their friendship; his career brings out the best elements in stage life. The stage in these volumes presents itself indeed not merely as a mirror of life, but as an illustration of the utmost intensity of life, in the fortunes and characters of the players. Ups and downs, generosity, dark fates, the most delicate goodness, have nowhere been more prominent than in the private existence of those devoted to the public mimicry of men and women. Contact with the stage, almost throughout its history, presents itself as a kind of touchstone, to bring out the bizarrerie, the theatrical tricks and contrasts, of the actual world.

Adapted from an essay by W H Pater

    A sanctuary may be defined as a place where Man is passive and
    the rest of Nature active. Till quite recently Nature had her
    own sanctuaries, where man either did not go at all or only as
    a tool-using animal in comparatively small numbers. But now, in
5   this machinery age, there is no place left where man cannot go
    with overwhelming forces at his command. He can strangle to
    death all the nobler wild life in the world to-day. To-morrow
    he certainly will have done so, unless he exercises due
    foresight and self-control in the mean time.

10  There is not the slightest doubt that birds and mammals are
    now being killed off much faster than they can breed. And it
    is always the largest and noblest forms of life that suffer
    most. The whales and elephants, lions and eagles, go. The rats
    and flies, and all mean parasites, remain. This is inevitable
15  in certain cases. But it is wanton killing off that I am
    speaking of to-night. Civilized man begins by destroying
    the very forms of wild life he learns to appreciate most when
    he becomes still more civilized. The obvious remedy is to begin
    conservation at an earlier stage, when it is easier and better
20  in every way, by enforcing laws for close seasons, game preserves,
    the selective protection of certain species, and sanctuaries.

    I have just defined a sanctuary as a place where man is passive
    and the rest of Nature active. But this general definition is too
    absolute for any special case. The mere fact that man has to
25  protect a sanctuary does away with his purely passive attitude.
    Then, he can be beneficially active by destroying pests and
    parasites, like bot-flies or mosquitoes, and by finding antidotes
    for diseases like the epidemic which periodically kills off the
    rabbits and thus starves many of the carnivora to death. But,
30  except in cases where experiment has proved his intervention to
    be beneficial, the less he upsets the balance of Nature the
    better, even when he tries to be an earthly Providence.

Adapted from: Animal Sanctuaries in Labrador, W Wood (1911)