Admission Tests GRE Actual Questions

Robert Philip argues that the advent of recorded music has directed performance style into a search for greater precision and perfection, with a consequent loss of spontaneity and warmth. Various expressive devices once common in classical music have been almost outlawed, including portamento (sliding from one note to another on a stringed instrument), playing the piano with the hands not quite synchronized, and flexibility of tempo. Philip fully documents these changes. However, other forces independent of recording were also at work. For example, the freedom of tempo so valued by Philip was. in its time, both a necessary expedient and disastrously abused. Recording alone did not cause the reaction against it. although hearing a particularly unintelligent use of it on disc may have reinforced the prejudice.

Hie author would most likely agree with which of the following statements about the "devices"?

The importance of the Bill of Rights in twentieth-century United States law and politics has led some historians to search for the "original meaning" of its most controversial clauses. This approach. known as "originalism." presumes that each right codified in the Bill of Rights had au independent history that can be studied in isolation from the histories of other rights, and its proponents ask how formulations of the Bill of Rights in 1791 reflected developments in specific areas of legal thinking at that time. Legal and constitutional historians, for example, have found originalism especially useful in the study of provisions of the Bill of Rights that were innovative by eighteenth-century standards, such as the Fourth Amendment's broadly termed protection against "unreasonable searches and seizures." Recent calls in the legal and political arena for a return to a "jurisprudence of original intention." however, have made it a matter of much more than purely scholarly interest when originalists insist that a clause's true meaning was fixed at the moment of its adoption, or maintain that only those rights explicitly mentioned in the United States Constitution deserve constitutional recognition and protection. These two claims seemingly lend support to the notion that an interpreter must apply fixed definitions of a fixed number of rights to contemporary issues, for the claims imply that the central problem of rights in the Revolutionary era was to precisely identity, enumerate, and define those rights that Americans felt were crucial to protecting their liberty.

Both claims, however, are questionable from the perspective of a strictly historical inquiry, however sensible they may seem from the vantage point of contemporary jurisprudence. Even though originalists are correct in claiming that the search for original meaning is inherently historical, historians would not normally seek.

It can be inferred that the author of the passage would be most likely to agree with which of the following statements about the Bill of Rights?

Business leaders who prefer centralized, pyramidal managerial structures to diversity and competition tend to (i)_________dissent in the decision-making process. But this insistence on (ii)_________can be dangerous in that it deprives decision makers of a full range of alternatives.

Even the most complex models used in fishery management are cartoons of reality. They reduce hundreds of links in food webs to a handful and inadequately represent processes operating over space. Many of their assumptions are as flawed today as those of the simplest models of the past. Fish stocks, for one. are still assumed to be populations of a species that are isolated from one another. Yet many populations mix at their edges and some even migrate through areas occupied by other populations. Furthermore, the more complex models suffer from a "crisis of complexity"—more is really less. Adding layers of detail, each carrying its own set of assumptions, produces instability. The model's behavior becomes erratic, and conclusions drawn from it can be downright misleading.

In the context of the passage, the highlighted portion serves to