In addition to introducing the topic, what is the purpose of the first paragraph in this passage?
Show Hint
- To describe the dire plight of students who cannot learn languages well
- To make a concession and present reasons why people dislike language exams in graduate school
- To explain the the justifications for delaying graduate school language exams for several years
- To discuss the various means of language examinations used in graduate schools
- To advocate on behalf of an elimination of graduate school language exams
The Correct Option is B
Solution and Explanation
Step 1: Understanding the Concept:
This question asks for the specific function of the first paragraph, beyond just introducing the topic. We need to analyze what rhetorical role this paragraph plays in the author's larger argument.
Step 2: Detailed Explanation:
The first paragraph is entirely focused on the negative aspects of language exams for students. It uses words like "frustrating and difficult," "difficult course load," and "very frustrating." It details the heavy reading and writing assignments to show why adding language exams is such a burden. By doing this, the author is showing the reader that they understand the students' perspective and the validity of their complaints. This is a rhetorical strategy known as concession, where you acknowledge the points of the opposing side before presenting your own argument.
Let's analyze the options:
- (A) It describes the plight of all graduate students facing the requirement, not just those who are bad at languages.
- (B) This is the most accurate description. The author concedes that the frustrations are real and explains the reasons for them (heavy workload).
- (C) The paragraph does not mention delaying exams.
- (D) The paragraph does not discuss different types of exams.
- (E) The paragraph presents reasons for disliking the exams, but it does so as a setup for the author's defense, not as an argument for elimination. The author's actual position is the opposite of this.
Step 3: Final Answer:
The first paragraph's primary purpose is to concede the difficulty of language exams and explain why students find them frustrating, setting the stage for the counterargument in the second paragraph. Option (B) correctly identifies this purpose.
Top Questions on Reading Comprehension
For the past two years at FasCorp, there has been a policy to advertise any job opening to current employees and to give no job to an applicant from outside the company if a FasCorp employee applies who is qualified for the job. This policy has been strictly followed, yet even though numerous employees of FasCorp have been qualified for any given entry-level position, some entry-level jobs have been filled with people from outside the company.
If the information provided is true, which of the following must on the basis of it also be true about FasCorp during the past two years?- GRE - 2025
- Verbal Reasoning
- Reading Comprehension
As an example of the devastation wrought on music publishers by the photocopier, one executive noted that for a recent choral festival with 1,200 singers, the festival’s organizing committee purchased only 12 copies of the music published by her company that was 5 performed as part of the festival.
Which of the following, if true, most seriously weakens the support the example lends to the executive’s contention that music publishers have been devastated by the photocopier?- GRE - 2025
- Verbal Reasoning
- Reading Comprehension
- In the 1970s, two debates engaged many scholars of early United States history. One focused on the status of women, primarily White women. Turning on the so-called golden age theory, which posited that during the eighteenth-century colonial era, American women enjoyed a brief period of high status relative to their English contemporaries and to nineteenth-century American women, this debate pitted scholars who believed women’s lives deteriorated after 1800 against those who thought women’s lives had been no better before 1800. At issue were the causes of women’s subordination: were these causes already in place when the English first settled North America or did they emerge with the rise of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism?
The second debate, the so-called origins debate, concerned the emergence of racial slavery in the southern colonies: was slavery the inevitable result of the deep-rooted racial prejudice of early British colonists or did racial prejudice arise only after these planters instituted slave labor?
Although these debates are parallel in some respects, key differences distinguished them. Whereas the debate over women’s status revolved around implicit comparisons of colonial women to their counterparts in the antebellum period (1800--1860), thus inviting comment from scholars of both historical periods, the origins debate was primarily confined to a discussion about slavery in colonial America. Second, in contrast to the newness of the debate over women’s status and its continued currency throughout the early 1980s, the debate over race and slavery, begun in the 1950s, had lost some of its urgency with the publication of Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom (1975), widely regarded as the last word on the subject.
Each debate also assumed a different relationship to the groups whose histories it concerned. In its heyday, the origins debate focused mainly on White attitudes toward Africans rather than on Africans themselves. With few exceptions, such as Wood’s Black Majority (1974) and Mullin’s Flight and Rebellion (1972), which were centrally concerned with enslaved African men, most works pertaining to the origins debate focused on the White architects, mostly male, of racial slavery. In contrast, although women’s historians were interested in the institutions and ideologies contributing to women’s subordination, they were equally concerned with documenting women’s experiences. As in the origins debate, however, early scholarship on colonial women defined its historical constituency narrowly, women’s historians focusing mainly on affluent White women.
Over time, however, some initial differences between the approaches taken by scholars in the two fields faded. In the 1980s, historians of race and slavery in colonial America shifted their attention to enslaved people; interest in African American culture grew, thereby bringing enslaved women more prominently into view. Historians of early American women moved in similar directions during the decade and began to consider the effect of racial difference on women’s experience.- GRE - 2025
- Verbal Reasoning
- Reading Comprehension
- The most plausible justification for higher taxes on automobile fuel is that fuel consumption harms the environment and thus adds to the costs of traffic congestion. But the fact that burning fuel creates these “negative externalities” does not imply that no tax on fuel could ever be too high. Economics is precise about the tax that should, in principle, be levied to deal with negative externalities:
the tax on a liter of fuel should be equal to the harm caused by using a liter of fuel.
If the tax is more than that, its costs (including the inconvenience to those who would rather have used their cars) will exceed its benefits (including any reduction in congestion and pollution).- GRE - 2025
- Verbal Reasoning
- Reading Comprehension
- Objectively, of course, the various ecosystems that sustain life on the planet proceed independently of human agency, just as they operated before the hectic ascendancy of Homo sapiens. But it is also true that it is difficult to think of a single such system that has not, for better or worse, been substantially modified by human culture. Nor is this simply the work of the industrial centuries. It has been happening since the days of ancient Mesopotamia. It is coeval with the origins of writing, and has occurred throughout our social existence. And it is this irreversibly modified world, from the polar caps to the equatorial forests, that is all the nature we have.
- GRE - 2025
- Verbal Reasoning
- Reading Comprehension
Questions Asked in GMAT exam
- If y = 3, then y³(y³-y) =
- GMAT - 2025
- Algebra
If \(8x + 5x + 2x + 4x = 114\), then, \(5x + 3 = ?\)
- GMAT - 2025
- Algebra
If \(r = 5 z\) then \(15 z = 3 y,\) then \(r =\)
- GMAT - 2025
- Algebra
- Solve the following equation for A: 2A/3 = 8 + 4A
- GMAT - 2025
- Algebra
- Over the past 7 weeks, the Smith family had weekly grocery bills of $74, $69, $64, $79, $64, $84, and $77. What was the Smiths' average (arithmetic mean) weekly grocery bill over the 7-week period?
- GMAT - 2025
- Averages