List of top Verbal Reasoning Questions

The way in which the mighty blue whale and the other baleen whales—the finback, gray, humpback, and right whales—eats was discovered by careful observation by biologists.

The stock market collapse of 1929 had far-reaching consequences for the national economy, causing a nationwide collapse in home values, putting millions out of work, and by erasing the investment savings of one-fifth of the population.

Women's grassroots activism and their vision of a new civic consciousness lay at the heart of social reform in the United States throughout the Progressive Era, the period between the depression of 1893 and America's entry into the Second World War. Though largely disenfranchised except for school elections, white middle-class women reformers won a variety of victories, notably in the improvement of working conditions, especially for women and children. Ironically, though, child labor legislation pitted women of different classes against one another. To the reformers, child labor and industrial home work were equally inhumane practices that should be outlawed, but, as a number of women historians have recently observed, working-class mothers did not always share this view. Given the precarious finances of working-class families and the necessity of pooling the wages of as many family members as possible, working-class families viewed the passage and enforcement of stringent child labor statutes as a personal economic disaster and made strenuous efforts to circumvent child labor laws. Yet reformers rarely understood this resistance in terms of the desperate economic situation of working-class families, interpreting it instead as evidence of poor parenting. This is not to dispute women reformers' perception of child labor as a terribly exploitative practice, but their understanding of child labor and their legislative solutions for ending it failed to take account of the economic needs of working-class families.

The idea of the brain as an information processor—a machine manipulating blips of energy according to fathomable rules—has come to dominate neuroscience. However, one enemy of the brain-as-computer metaphor is John R. Searle, a philosopher who argues that since computers simply follow algorithms, they cannot deal with important aspects of human thought such as meaning and content. Computers are syntactic, rather than semantic, creatures. People, on the other hand, understand meaning because they have something Searle obscurely calls the causal powers of the brain.
Yet how would a brain work if not by reducing what it learns about the world to information—some kind of code that can be transmitted from neuron to neuron? What else could meaning and content be? If the code can be cracked, a computer should be able to simulate it, at least in principle. But even if a computer could simulate the workings of the mind, Searle would claim that the machine would not really be thinking; it would just be acting as if it were. His argument proceeds thus: if a computer were used to simulate a stomach, with the stomach’s churnings faithfully reproduced on a video screen, the machine would not be digesting real food. It would just be blindly manipulating the symbols that generate the visual display.
Suppose, though, that a stomach were simulated using plastic tubes, a motor to do the churning, a supply of digestive juices, and a timing mechanism. If food went in one end of the device, what came out the other end would surely be digested food. Brains, unlike stomachs, are information processors, and if one information processor were made to simulate another information processor, it is hard to see how one and not the other could be said to think. Simulated thoughts and real thoughts are made of the same element: information. The representations of the world that humans carry around in their heads are already simulations. To accept Searle’s argument, one would have to deny the most fundamental notion in psychology and neuroscience: that brains work by processing information

According to economic signaling theory, consumers may perceive the frequency with which an unfamiliar brand is advertised as a cue that the brand is of high quality. The notion that highly advertised brands are associated with high-quality products does have some empirical support. Marquardt and McGann found that heavily advertised products did indeed rank high on certain measures of product quality. Because large advertising expenditures represent a significant investment on the part of a manufacturer, only companies that expect to recoup these costs in the long run, through consumers' repeat purchases of the product, can afford to spend such amounts.
However, two studies by Kirmani have found that although consumers initially perceive expensive advertising as a signal of high brand quality, at some level of spending the manufacturer’s advertising effort may be perceived as unreasonably high, implying low manufacturer confidence in product quality. If consumers perceive excessive advertising effort as a sign of a manufacturer’s desperation, the result may be less favorable brand perceptions. In addition, a third study by Kirmani, of print advertisements, found that the use of color affected consumer perception of brand quality. Because consumers recognize that color advertisements are more expensive than black and white, the point at which repetition of an advertisement is perceived as excessive comes sooner for a color advertisement than for a black-and-white advertisement.

Whereas a ramjet generally cannot achieve high speeds without the initial assistance of a rocket, high speeds can be attained by scramjets, or supersonic combustion ramjets, in that they reduce airflow compression at the entrance of the engine and letting air pass through at supersonic speeds.
Which of the following, if true, most seriously weakens the argument?

By developing the Secure Digital Music Initiative, the recording industry associations of North America, Japan, and Europe hope to create a standardized way of distributing songs and full-length recordings on the Internet that will protect copyright holders and foil the many audio pirates who copy and distribute digital music illegally.
Which of the following is the correct version of the sentence?

As an actress and, more importantly, as a teacher of acting, Stella Adler was one of the most influential artists in the American theater, who trained several generations of actors including Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro.
Which of the following is the correct version of the sentence?

It will not be possible to implicate melting sea ice in the coastal flooding that many global warming models have projected: just like a glass of water that will not overflow due to melting ice cubes, so melting sea ice does not increase oceanic volume.
Which of the following, if true, most seriously weakens the argument?

The Supreme Court has ruled that public universities can collect student activity fees even with students' objections to particular activities, so long as the groups they give money to will be chosen without regard to their views.
Which of the following is the correct version of the sentence?

Despite the increasing number of women graduating from law school and passing bar examinations, the proportion of judges and partners at major law firms who are women has not risen to a comparable extent.
Which of the following is the correct version of the sentence?

Seldom more than 40 feet wide and 12 feet deep, but it ran 363 miles across the rugged wilderness of upstate New York, the Erie Canal connected the Hudson River at Albany to the Great Lakes at Buffalo, providing the port of New York City with a direct water link to the heartland of the North American continent.
Which of the following is the correct version of the sentence?

In 1923, the Supreme Court declared a minimum wage for women and children in the District of Columbia as unconstitutional, and ruling that it was a form of price-fixing and, as such, an abridgment of the right of contract.
Which of the following is the correct version of the sentence?

Researchers have found that individuals who have been blind from birth, and who thus have never seen anyone gesture, nevertheless make hand motions when speaking just as frequently and in virtually the same way as sighted people do, and that they will gesture even when conversing with another blind person.
Which of the following is the correct version of the sentence?

Like embryonic germ cells, which are cells that develop early in the formation of the fetus and that later generate eggs or sperm, embryonic stem cells have the ability of developing themselves into different kinds of body tissue.
Which of the following is the correct version of the sentence?

Critics contend that the new missile is a weapon whose importance is largely symbolic, more a tool for manipulating people’s perceptions than to fulfill a real military need.
Which of the following is the correct version of the sentence?

Excavators at the Indus Valley site of Harappa in eastern Pakistan say the discovery of inscribed shards dating to circa 2800–2600 B.C. indicate their development of a Harappan writing system, the use of inscribed seals impressed into clay for marking ownership, and the standardization of weights for trade or taxation occurred many decades, if not centuries, earlier than was previously believed.
Which of the following is the correct version of the sentence?

In 1995 Richard Stallman, a well-known critic of the patent system, testified in Patent Office hearings that, to test the system, a colleague of his had managed to win a patent for one of Kirchhoff’s laws, an observation about electric current first made in 1845 and now included in virtually every textbook of elementary physics.
Which of the following is the correct version of the sentence?

According to scholars, the earliest writing was probably not a direct rendering of speech, but was more likely to begin as a separate and distinct symbolic system of communication, and only later merged with spoken language.
Which of the following is the correct version of the sentence?

Unlike the buildings in Mesopotamian cities, which were arranged haphazardly, the same basic plan was followed for all cities of the Indus Valley: with houses laid out on a north-south, east-west grid, and houses and walls were built of standard-size bricks.
Which of the following is the correct version of the sentence?

Select the correct words to complete the passage: "While early astronomers believed that planets orbited the Earth, modern observations have _________ this theory, demonstrating that planets actually revolve around the Sun."

The novelist was known for her _________ prose, which, though admired by literary critics, often left casual readers confused and disengaged.

Although she was a highly accomplished scientist, her public lectures were often so _________ that even a well-educated audience struggled to understand her main points.

The researchers ________ the data for three years before publishing their findings.

Which sentence correctly follows parallel structure?