GRE Text Completion Practice Test 04

1. Unwilling to admit that they had been in error, the researchers tried to ____ their case with more data obtained from dubious sources.

A. ascertain
B. buttress
C. refute
D. absolve
E. dispute

2. Archaeology is a poor profession; modest sums are available for excavating sites and even more (i)____ amounts for preserving the excavations. As a result many sites that are still to reveal even a fraction of their potentially vital information have been (ii)____ and left to the forces of Nature. Re-opening such sites in the future will be all but (iii)____.

3. The student was extremely foolhardy; he had the ____ to question the senior professor's judgment.

A. wisdom
B. temerity
C. interest
D. trepidation
E. condescension

4. The formerly (i)____ waters of the lake have become (ii)____. So even though the waters are teeming with life, fish are no longer visible from the surface.

5. After the accident, the nerves to her arm were damaged and so the muscles ____ through disuse.

A. atrophied
B. contracted
C. elongated
D. invigorated
E. dwindled

6. Some critics maintain that Tennyson's poetry is uneven, ranging from the (i)____ to the (ii)____.

7. The immune system is capable of distinguishing self from other at the cellular level. After grafting, unless the immune system is effectively (i)____, there is a (ii)____ of lymphocytes in the lymph glands; the newly produced lymphocytes then move in to (iii)____ the foreign tissue.

8. One (i)____ of the new scheme is that it might actually (ii)____ just those applicants that it was intended to encourage.

9. Corruption is (i)____ our society; the integrity of even senior officials is (ii)____.

10. In their day to day decision making, many senior managers do not follow the apparently (i)____ model favored by orthodox management experts, but rather rely on intuitive processes that often appear (ii)____ and (iii)____.