GMAT Verbal Reasoning practice questions

Many retailers promise to match any lower price that a customer finds at a competing store. Shoppers generally welcome such guarantees, and the conventional view is that they make competition fiercer: a store that offers one signals confidence that its prices are already low and commits itself to matching any lower price a rival offers.

Some economists argue that price-matching guarantees can have the opposite effect. Suppose two stores sell the same television for $500 each. Ordinarily, either store might cut its price to $450 to draw customers away from the other. But if the rival has promised to match any lower price, the cut wins no customers, because the rival's shoppers can obtain the lower price without switching stores. The store that cuts its price gives up $50 on every sale and gains nothing in return. Once both stores offer guarantees, neither has a reason to lower its price, and both can keep prices higher than competition would otherwise allow.

This argument depends on shoppers finding it easier to claim a match than to change stores. Where claiming a match is cumbersome, as when a store demands printed proof of a rival's price and a manager's approval, shoppers who learn of a lower price may simply buy from the rival, and a price cut can once again win customers.

Many trees, including oaks, beeches, and several species of pine, reproduce in a strikingly irregular way. For several years in a row, a population produces few seeds; then, in a so-called mast year, most of the trees across a wide region, sometimes hundreds of kilometers across, produce an enormous crop at once. Ecologists have long sought to explain both why seed production varies so much and why trees so far apart keep to a common schedule.

The simplest explanation, known as resource matching, holds that trees produce seeds whenever conditions allow. A warm spring or ample rainfall leaves trees with surplus energy, and since trees across a region experience the same weather, they produce large crops in the same years. Resource matching undoubtedly accounts for some of the pattern, but it faces a serious difficulty. In many masting species, seed production varies far more from year to year than does any measure of weather or of available resources. A modest improvement in conditions can be followed by a crop many times larger than the previous year's. Trees, it appears, do not merely pass along fluctuations in their environment; they amplify them, storing resources through lean years and spending them all at once.

Since holding back seeds has costs of its own, ecologists have looked for benefits that might make the strategy worthwhile. One proposed benefit is predator satiation. Seed-eating animals such as weevils and mice cannot multiply quickly enough to consume a sudden glut, so a larger fraction of a mast crop survives than of an ordinary crop, and the lean years that follow keep the predators' numbers low. A second proposal applies to wind-pollinated species: when all the trees in a region flower heavily at once, the air is thick with pollen, and a larger proportion of flowers is fertilized.

These explanations are not mutually exclusive, and weather has not dropped out of the picture. Many researchers now think that weather acts chiefly as a cue that lets widely separated trees keep to the same schedule, rather than as what determines how much they produce.

Historians who want to know how many people could read in, say, late-eighteenth-century England face an obvious problem: reading leaves no trace. Writing does, and its richest record is the signatures, or marks, that brides and grooms placed in parish marriage registers. Because most adults married and the registers survive in large numbers, the proportion of people able to sign their names has become the standard measure of literacy for the period.

The measure has real advantages. It is uniform, it reaches men and women of nearly every social rank, and it allows comparisons across regions and decades. But it rests on the assumption that the ability to sign tracks the ability to read, and there is reason to doubt this. Children in the period were commonly taught to read first and to write only later, and many, especially girls and the children of the poor, left school after learning to read but before learning to write. A bride who signed with a cross may well have been able to read her Bible.

Signature counts are therefore best treated as a rough lower bound on the ability to read rather than as a direct measure of it. That does not make them useless. A change in signing rates over time can still point to a real change in reading ability, provided that the gap between those who could read and those who could also write stayed roughly constant over the period studied.

For much of the twentieth century, many critics treated the serial publication of Victorian novels as an embarrassment to be explained away. Many of the period's best-known novels first appeared in monthly or weekly installments, sold as separate parts or printed in magazines, and only afterward as complete books. To critics who prized the tightly unified novel, the features that serialization encouraged, such as sprawling casts of characters, subplots that wander off and return, and a moment of suspense at the close of each installment, looked like concessions to commerce. The serial, on this view, was merely the vehicle by which a novel reached its readers, and the critic's task was to look past the vehicle to the work itself.

More recent scholarship has reversed this judgment, or at least complicated it. Serialization, these scholars argue, was not a container into which a finished novel was poured but a condition under which novels were composed. Writers often began publishing before they had finished writing, and because a novel appeared over many months, often a year or more, readers lived alongside its characters, discussing their fortunes in letters and conversation. A novelist who could watch sales rise or fall from one month to the next could, and sometimes did, change the course of the story. Even the large casts that earlier critics deplored had a purpose: a reader who had missed an installment, or forgotten the last one, could still find a familiar thread to follow.

None of this means that every feature of a serialized novel deserves admiration. Some installments are plainly padded, and some loose ends were left loose because the writer forgot them. But to judge such novels by a standard of unity that they were never designed to meet is to misunderstand them. The more useful question is not whether a serialized novel achieves the compression of a novel written to be read as a single book, but how well it uses the possibilities of the form in which it was actually written.