While in many ways their personalities could not have been more different—she was ebullient where he was glum, relaxed where he was awkward, garrulous where he was BLANK — they were surprisingly well suited. Select the two answer choices that, when substituted for the BLANK, fit the context and produce the two sentences most nearly alike in meaning.
(A) solicitous
(B) munificent
(C) irresolute
(D) laconic
(E) fastidious
(F) taciturn
(A) solicitous
(B) munificent
(C) irresolute
(D) laconic
(E) fastidious
(F) taciturn
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Solution and Explanation
This sentence equivalence question is built on a series of parallel contrasts. We need to find two words that are synonyms and provide the logical opposite to the word "garrulous."
Step 2: Detailed Explanation:
The sentence lists pairs of opposite personality traits: ebullient (lively) vs. glum (sullen), and relaxed vs. awkward. The final pair contrasts "garrulous" with the word in the blank. "Garrulous" means excessively talkative, especially on trivial matters. Therefore, we need words that mean "not talkative," "reserved in speech," or "using few words."
Analyzing the Options:
(D) laconic: This means (of a person, speech, or style of writing) using very few words. This is a direct antonym of garrulous.
(F) taciturn: This means (of a person) reserved or uncommunicative in speech; saying little. This is also a direct antonym of garrulous and a strong synonym for laconic.
The other options do not fit the contrast:
(A) solicitous: showing interest or concern.
(B) munificent: very generous.
(C) irresolute: indecisive.
(E) fastidious: very attentive to detail; hard to please.
Step 3: Final Answer:
Both "laconic" and "taciturn" describe someone who says very little, providing the correct parallel contrast to "garrulous."
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Questions Asked in GRE exam
In early-twentieth-century England, it was fashionable to claim that only a completely new style of writing could address a world undergoing unprecedented transformation — just as one literary critic recently claimed that only the new ”aesthetic of exploratory excess” can address a world undergoing . . . well, you know. Yet in early-twentieth-century England, T. S. Eliot, a man fascinated by the ”presence” of the past, wrote the most innovative poetry of his time. The lesson for today’s literary community seems obvious: a reorientation toward tradition would benefit writers no less than readers. But if our writers and critics indeed respect the novel’s rich tradition (as they claim to), then why do they disdain the urge to tell an exciting story?
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In the 1970’s, 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 the ory, 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 capital ism? 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 1980’s, the debate over race and slavery, begun in the 1950’s, 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 ide ologies 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.
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