GRE Literature in English (REA) (46 page)

The passage was written by

1. William Congreve.
   
2. Jonathan Swift.
   
3. Samuel Johnson.
   
4. James Boswell.
   
5. Thomas Gray.
   

The poet of whose works I have undertaken the revision may now begin to assume the dignity of an ancient and claim the privilege of established fame and prescriptive veneration. He has long outlived his century, the term commonly fixed as the test of literary merit.

The poet the author is speaking of is

1. Christopher Marlowe.
   
2. Geoffrey Chaucer.
   
3. William Shakespeare.
   
4. Dante.
   
5. Sir Walter Raleigh.
   

The author of the passage is

1. William Wordsworth.
   
2. Thomas Gray.
   
3. Matthew Arnold.
   
4. Samuel Johnson.
   
5. Jonathan Swift.
   

Adam walked round by the rick-yard, at present empty of ricks, to the little wooden gate leading into the garden—once the well-tended kitchen-garden of a manor house; now, but for the handsome brick wall with stone coping that ran along one side of it ... a true farmhouse garden.

 

The author of this passage is

1. Jane Austen.
   
2. George Eliot.
   
3. Charles Dickens.
   
4. Thomas Hardy.
   
5. Jack London.
   

Who cares whether Mr. Ruskin's views on Turner are sound or not? What does it matter? That mighty and majestic prose of his, so fervid and so fiery colored in its noble eloquence, so rich in its elaborate symphonic music, so sure and certain at its best, in subtle choice of word and epithet, is at least as great a work of art as any of those wonderful sunsets that bleach or rot on their corrupted canvases in England's Gallery ...

The author is arguing that

1. criticism is irrelevant to the purity of art.
   
2. criticism is independent to the quality of art.
   
3. criticism is equal with art as a form of art.
   
4. artists should not be bounded by what critics say about them.
   
5. critics should not be held to account for what they say about art.
   

The author of this passage is

1. Matthew Arnold.
   
2. Henry Newman.
   
3. Walter Pater.
   
4. Oscar Wilde.
   
5. G.B. Shaw.
   

Look in my face; my name is Might-have-been;
I am also called No-more, Too-late, Farewell;
Unto thine ear I hold the dead-sea-shell
Cast up thy Life's foam—fretted feet between;
Unto thine eyes the glass where that is seen
Which had Life's form and Love's, but by my spell
Is now a shaken shadow intolerable,
Of ultimate things unuttered the frail screen.
Mark me, how still I am! But should there dart
One moment through thy soul the soft surprise
Of that winged Peace which lulls the breath of sighs,—
Then shalt thou see me smile, and turn apart
Thy visage to mine ambush at thy heart
Sleepless with cold commemorative eyes.

One poetic device that is repeated throughout this poem is

1. personification.
   
2. assonance.
   
3. alliteration.
   
4. allegory.
   
5. onomatopoeia.
   

The poet is

1. appealing to his lover to be more attentive.
   
2. regretting a loss of love.
   
3. announcing his reluctance to proceed further with the affair.
   
4. explaining his wish for some response to his overtures of love.
   
5. appealing to his former lover for a resurrection of their romance.
   

The author of this poem is

1. Browning.
   
2. Tennyson.
   
3. Donne.
   
4. Rossetti.
   
5. W. S. Gilbert.
   

Have the elder races halted?
Do they droop and end their lesson, wearied over there beyond the seas?
We take up the task eternal, and the burden and the lesson,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

The “elder races” cited here refer to

1. the ancient Greeks.
   
2. the ancient Romans.
   
3. the contemporary Europeans.
   
4. pre-historic man.
   
5. first-century Christians.
   

This poem was written by

1. John Greenleaf Whittier.
   
2. Ralph Waldo Emerson.
   
3. Walt Whitman.
   
4. Alfred Noyes.
   
5. Ellery Channing.
   

He had before served me a scurvy trick, which set the Queen laughing, although at the same time she were heartily vexed, and would have immediately cashiered him, if I had not been so generous as to intercede. Her Majesty had taken a marrow bone upon her plate, and after knocking out the marrow, placed the bone again in the dish, erect as it stood before; the dwarf watching his opportunity, while Glumdalclitch was gone to the sideboard ...

This passage is an account of

1. a descent into Hades.
   
2. a voyage to Brobdingnag.
   
3. the arrival in Wonderland.
   
4. an introduction to Utopia.
   
5. an expedition in
   Journey to the Center of the Earth
   .
   

“Cashiered” is best interpreted as meaning

1. paid off.
   
2. executed.
   
3. dismissed.
   
4. ridiculed.
   
5. rewarded.
   

The passage was written by

1. Lewis Carroll.
   
2. Isaac Asimov.
   
3. Jonathan Swift.
   
4. Jules Verne.
   
5. H. G. Wells.
   

Ever such is time, which takes in trust
Our youth, our joys, and all we have,
And pays us but with age and dust,
Who in the dark and silent grave
When we have wandered all our ways
Shuts up the story of our days,
And from which earth, and grave, and dust
The Lord shall raise me up, I trust.

This poem is best described as

1. an elegy.
   
2. a pastoral.
   
3. a psalm.
   
4. an epitaph.
   
5. an encomium.
   

In this poem, three forces battle each other; they are

1. youth, time, and death.
   
2. trust, time, and the Lord.
   
3. joy, death, and dust.
   
4. youth, age, and death.
   
5. life, death, and the Lord.
   

The poem was written by

1. Shakespeare.
   
2. Spenser.
   
3. Raleigh.
   
4. Lovelace.
   
5. Daniel.
   

For no very intelligible reason, Mr. Lucas had hurried ahead of his party. He was perhaps reaching the age at which independence becomes valuable, because it is so soon to be lost. Tired of attention and consideration, he liked breaking away from the younger members, to ride by himself, and to dismount unassisted.

 

This passage is taken from

1. The Road to Colonus.
   
2. To the Lighthouse.
   
3. Far From the Madding Crowd.
   
4. The Open Window.
   
5. The House of Mirth.
   

And that's what you learn, when you're a novelist. And that's what you are very liable not to know, if you're a parson, or a philosopher, or a scientist, or a stupid person. If you're a parson, you talk about souls in heaven. If you're a novelist, you know that paradise is in the palm of your hand, and on the end of your nose, because both are alive; and alive, and man alive, which is more than you can say, for certain, of paradise.

The author of this passage has learned

1. that parsons are not qualified to talk about heaven.
   
2. that paradise is the realm of the philosopher.
   
3. that what you hold in your hand is all that is real.
   
4. that whatever else might be true, he himself is alive.
   
5. that stupidity and belief in paradise go hand in hand.
   

The author of this passage is also the author of

1. The Mayor of Casterbridge.
   
2. To the Lighthouse.
   
3. The Great Gatsby.
   
4. Sons and Lovers.
   
5. To Your Scattered Bodies Go.
   

My family originated in a village in the mountains of Leon, where Nature was kinder to them than Fortune, although in those poor villages my father was reputed to be a rich man, and indeed, he would have been if he had been as skillful in preserving his estate as he was in spending it.

 

The character here describing his family's history is

1. David Copperfield.
   
2. Huckleberry Finn.
   
3. Tess.
   
4. Don Quixote.
   
5. Jean Valjean.
   

Levin laid his brother on his back, sat down beside him and, hardly daring to breathe, gazed at his face. The dying man lay with closed eyes but the muscles of his forehead twitched every now and then, as with one thinking deeply and intently.

 

This passage is from

1. The Cossacks.
   
2. War and Peace.
   
3. Anna Karenina.
   
4. Fathers and Sons.
   
5. Crime and Punishment.
   

“In contrast to Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not believe in a uniform, absolute time. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times. This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces
all
possibilities
of
time. We do not exist in the majority of these times; in some you exist, and not I; in others, I, and not you; in others, both of us. In the present one, which a favorable fate has granted me, you have arrived at my house; in another, while crossing the garden, you found me dead; in still another, I utter these same words, but I am a mistake, a ghost.”

“In every one,” I pronounced, not without a tremble to my voice, “I am grateful to you and revere you for your re-creation of the garden of Ts'ui Pen.”

“Not in all,” he murmured with a smile. “Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures. In one of them I am your enemy.”

The tone of the passage is

1. threatening.
   
2. gloomy.
   
3. sarcastic.
   
4. patronizing.
   
5. instructive.
   

The author of this passage is

1. Jorge Luis Borges.
   
2. John Barth.
   
3. Samuel Beckett.
   
4. Kurt Vonnegut.
   
5. Margaret Atwood.
   

Which is by Aldous Huxley?

Which is by Flannery O'Connor?

Which is by F. Scott Fitzgerald?

Which is by John Updike?

1. The chairman spoke in Bulgarian, musically, at length. There was polite laughter. Nobody translated for Bech. The professorial type, his hair like a flazen toupee, jerked forward.
   

2. The old woman and her daughter were sitting on their porch when Mr. Shiftlet came up their road for the first time. The old woman slid to the edge of her chair and leaned forward, shading her eyes from the piercing sunset with her hand.
   

3. Inert, Sebastian abandoned himself to the tenderness which at ordinary times he would never allow her to express, and in the very act of self-abandonment found a certain isolation. Suddenly and irrelevantly, it came into his mind that this was one of the situations he had always looked forward to in his dream of a love affair with Mary Esdaile—or whatever other name one chose to give the dark-haired mistress of his imagination.
   

4. As I watched him he adjusted himself a little, visibly. His hand took hold of hers, and as she said something low in his ear he turned toward her with a rush of emotion. I think that voice held him most, with its fluctuating, feverish warmth, because it couldn't be over-dreamed —that voice was a deathless song.
   

5. Lem hesitated only long enough to take a firm purchase on his store teeth, then dashed into the path of the horses. With great strength and agility, he grasped their bridles and dragged them to a rearing halt, a few feet from the astounded and thoroughly frightened pair.